Loss and grief take you on such a strange journey. They’re so hard to process. You definitely can’t force it… which I guess is true for all emotions – you just need to ride them. But the thing is that grief and loss really don’t give you any warning and they completely take over when they arrive.

Sometimes it sort of creeps up on you during the least griefy moments. In the middle of utter joy or hilarity or passion – bang – remember you lost this thing and you’re meant to be devastated! I’m learning to let the joy and the grief live side by side in my heart. To not automatically silence the pain. But it’s hard because it feels counter intuitive. It’s like feeling heat and still placing your hand in the fire. The minute my heart feels the edge of the pain of the loss I flinch, my body tenses and I want to recoil away from it. It takes all of my strength to be curious and follow the sadness. To really look at it and embrace it.

I feel guilty when I’m caught up in joy then suddenly remember that Anna is out there somewhere very ill and shielding. Probably hasn’t been out of her house or maybe even out of one part of her house for over four months. That’s if she’s not in hospital. Or worse. I feel awful when I think of how her life was turned upside down and how she tried to keep it as normal as possible for me… setting up a little lookalike therapy room in a corner of her house for our Zoom sessions. With a tiny table and candle. My heart hurts for her. I wonder what her life is like now. Totally stripped of all the things that she’d built for herself in later years.

In my moments of triumph, though the pangs of guilt catch me off guard, I know she would have been cheering me on – encouraging me to lean into the joy. She would have told me, insisted in fact, ‘feel it Lucy, let go and allow yourself to feel loved, feel overjoyed, let Little Lucy play…’ and for fleeting moments I do. Then I suddenly remember I’ll never be able to tell her about these moments. And it brings such sadness and regret. I want to share all of this with Anna. I learned so much just by sharing my new found happiness with her. Letting myself believe in the good and learning through her that I was allowed to be happy and relaxed and loved.

Anna was the mother I always longed for and I’d only just begun learning to let her love in. I really wish I could tell her all the ways that her love is still shaping my life and all the reasons why I wish she was still here. I want to share my little victories and my colossal heartbreaks. I strain inside myself to find her words of wisdom when I really need her support… ‘what would Anna say right now?’ I think to myself. And I do have to think very very hard. I place myself in that room in my mind and I try very hard to formulate the words to express to her what I’m going through and then I listen, so intently, as if to hear the quiet whisper of a ghost whistling through a valley… sometimes I hear her, other times it’s just silence. I wrap my arms around myself, pretending she’s holding me. 🌿 there are little parts of me not quite ready to let her go… even though it’s been 9.5 weeks since she let me go 🖤

I told Linda that I felt it would be a good idea to talk about how things have been going between me and Adam. I said that after the last session on Saturday things felt so much better, I felt closer to him, we talked about some deeper stuff and I felt good about us again. But the past few days have been hard going again and I can’t get to the bottom of it.

I said that Adam’s job is facing a lot of changes and the business is being restructured. All staff will need to have a consultation in the next couple of weeks and there will be redundancies. I said to Linda, ‘if it’s based on performance then he will be fine, as long as his job is still necessary in this climate… he is the most hard working, loyal, reliable person. He’s had less than a week off sick in 16 years. He puts everything into his work. I was trying to tell him all the things he could tell his boss when they have the meeting. That he has experience in customer care, call centre work, office admin, warehouse experience… he would be willing to fulfil other roles in the company and within reason he could be flexible. But he was getting annoyed with me, saying I was bombarding him with information and ended up asking me if I would go full time so he could stop working!’ I said to Linda that it really annoys me when he says this because it’s not something I want to do. Being part time really helps balance things for me, it helps my mental health. I earn more than him working three days a week than he does working 5 days a week and my job is very stressful. He gets to come home and not think about his job but I never really switch off fully from my job and there is a lot of preparation to do that I bring home. Linda said, ‘is this linked to the imbalance of emotional labour that you feel, do you think?’ and I said, ‘without a doubt, absolutely!’ I said, ‘it feels like I’m always the one who has to help us get better, help us achieve more, I carry the weight of being the main ‘bread-winner’ because I need to stay in this job for us to continue with the life we’re used to, I am the one who propels us forwards while he doesn’t ever make any changes. I went back to full time work after I had Grace and it was so hard to find balance. I have made loads of changes over the years to improve our situation. He’s been talking about looking for a better job for 16 years.’ I said, ‘Adam said to me the other day that he was listening to a podcast I sent him recently and he said he’s realised that he is depressed and actually he’s been depressed his whole life, even as a child. In my head I was thinking, ‘I know, we’ve talked loads about this!’ so I said to him in an understanding way, ‘I know… I want you to know that you don’t have to suffer Adam, you can make changes. Maybe therapy or you could speak to a doctor about medication…’ and Linda said, ‘yes… only it might actually be very difficult for him to make a change.’

I said, ‘there’s this quote that I love… it’s about doing better when you know better… och what is it?’ She said she didn’t know it and I thought for a bit and couldn’t remember so eventually I looked it up on my phone and read it out to her, ‘Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better.’ Maya Angelou. She said, ‘oh yeah Maya Angelou.’ I said, ‘I really love that quote and I feel like I try to live my life by it. It started when I had kids… I wanted to learn everything I could about how I could do a better job than my parents did…’ I looked up at her and she had this smile on her face she sometimes does which kind of portrays a sense of understanding but also like ‘you’re on the cusp so something’ type expression. I continued, ‘So, I can see how that directly feeds into my perfectionism… like nothing but the best is good enough and then you have to work hard at doing better than your best. But I really feel like, what’s the point in life if we don’t live it with this mentality? What actually is the point in life if all we ever do is stay the same? If you never learn anything from your life then what is the actual point of life? Surely the whole reason we’re here is to learn and grow and develop and keep getting better and better?’

Linda said, ‘Hmmm…’ she was smiling and told me it really intrigued her that I was saying this, she said she liked that she was getting to know me better. She said, ‘Not everyone is capable of that, Lucy. You are very focused on change and improvement. Adam talks about it, but doesn’t make the changes, is that fair to say?’ I said, ‘yeah when we talk about these things he will say that he gets it but he won’t ever actively do anything to change things. Or he will make a small change, maybe to his attitude, but it will be short lived. So for example say he is short tempered or grumpy, I’ll then tell him I don’t like how he spoke to me and he’ll apologise and he’ll be very affectionate with me but I’m still annoyed coz you know, when you say sorry that means you’ll never do it again! Why say sorry at all if you’re just going to repeat the same mistake it over and over… that’s abusive… that’s what my mum would do!’ Linda said, ‘okay, okay Lucy come back to this present moment and focus on this situation with Adam just now, does that sound alright? To just stay here and focus on the adult situation between you and Adam… yes?’ I nodded and laughed. She said, ‘So, you value change. Adam, over the past nearly 19 years has consistently stayed the same, he has consistently shown you that he is unable to make the changes, yes?’ I just silently looked at her and sighed, defeated. She said, ‘so… it’s that old thing of, ‘we can’t expect other people to change unless they want to change,’ isn’t it?’ I said, ‘fuck!’ and she said, ‘haha yes, quote unquote… fuck!’ I said, ‘fuck sake… okay so how do I learn to accept this part of him then?’ she said, ‘okay so Adam behaves in a certain way or says or does a certain thing and it hurts your feelings or makes you feel bad. He then apologises but you don’t feel like it’s a real apology?’ I said, ‘well ‘sorry’ means, ‘I’m not going to do that thing again,’ so if you repeatedly have to go round this cycle of doing a thing, apologising then doing the thing again and then apologising… I’d surely be a fucking idiot to keep believing his apology, clearly it’s not genuine?’ Linda said, ‘so this is actually really interesting because it’s telling me a lot about you and your values… so you value change highly, you also value intention… you value honesty… you believe that an apology means you’re promising to never make the same mistake again… so an apology is for the future?’ At this point I was looking all round the room and frowning and she sort of leaned right in as if she was getting more interested in the conversation and said, ‘is that anger? Are you feeling angry about this, Lucy?’ I said, ‘no… I think I’m confused… this is all making me think very hard… so… does saying you’re sorry NOT mean you’ll never do it again?’ she thought about it and I said, ‘I actually remember the first time I heard it… I was 8 years old and in class. I saw a boy being told off for something serious, actually he was being humiliated by the teacher and he said he was sorry and the teacher was really exasperated and said to him, ‘when you say you’re sorry it means you must never do it again or else the apology is meaningless,’ and so I guess I really took that in, it really shaped my belief around what sorry means… probably because I never wanted to make the same mistake as that boy and be humiliated in front of the class.’ Linda said, ‘okay, so it’s about control in that case… and any forgiveness is conditional on future behaviour?’ I took a while to answer and she asked what was going on for me, I told her I was letting all this sink in because it was really shaking up something that I thought I strongly believed in. She was making me question something I thought was a core belief, something I thought I was completely right on. She told me it’s not about being right or wrong but it’s important to be curious about our beliefs and how they impact our relationships.

I said, ‘I know it’s important that we focus on the here and now but I can’t ignore the fact that my mum would do really horrible things or put me in really awful situations then later she would practically have an emotional breakdown over it, crying and apologising profusely and I would tell her it was fine and that I forgive her but then she’d do it over and over again… what’s happening with Adam feels like an abusive cycle you know?’ Linda had a very compassionate expression on her face and she quietly said, ‘it feels abusive, I really do get that and it makes total sense that you would want to protect yourself from being hurt repeatedly like you were as a child. From where I’m sitting, tell me if I’m wrong, but it sounds like something different is going on here. It sounds like Adam is not being abusive, that something is limiting his ability to make the changes, does that feel right? When he apologises does he sound or seem dismissive or does he appear to be being authentic and heartfelt?’ I said, ‘I know he’s not deliberately being abusive… he absolutely is genuinely sorry when he does something that annoys or hurts me especially when we’ve previously talked about it and he’s forgotten… he’s so lovely, Linda. He is kind and loving and never says anything to deliberately hurt me and he’s transparent and consistent and trustworthy and predictable… he’s all the things my mother wasn’t!’ Linda was smiling and nodding enthusiastically, I continued, ‘so I just need to be the bigger person, yet again…? I have to be the one who understands and makes exceptions…?’ Linda said, ‘I hear your very valid anger and resentment around that, I really do.’ I said, ‘but it just really feels very important that if someone says sorry then they also mean that they will never hurt you again in the same way… that’s what I mean when I say it!’ Linda said, ‘thank you… yes… that’s what it means to YOU. That’s very important.’

Linda looked thoughtful and said, ‘so… I’m just going to run something by you and I’m very aware that this is my stuff so I want you to really think carefully about whether this resonates with you and feel free to bat it out the court if it doesn’t sound right.’ I nodded. She said, ‘There are many reasons why a person might repeatedly make the same mistake, yet still be sorry for their behaviour. Many reasons why it might be hard for someone to make changes or be unable to understand things from your perspective. It could be the way someone’s brain works, it could be specific conditions…’ I was nodding and only really half following her and then she said, ‘I live with a person who is dyslexic and they process things very differently. There is a difficulty with taking in new information sometimes, a slower learning process, it’s harder for them to make changes or process information. So a person might really be listening intently but dyslexia impacts how the person processes information, how they take in and remember information.’ I said, ‘wow… so… wow… I have always thought Adam is probably dyslexic.’ Her eyes widened and she asked me to explain what I meant when I said I thought he was dyslexic. I said, ‘he wasn’t diagnosed but I think that’s because of the limitations at his school. He was in a small learning support group in primary school and in secondary school he had a scribe for exams. He got the highest distinction for music but failed almost all of his other exams. He’s intelligent, very creative and very musically minded but has massive things standing in his way… and you know as a teacher I just notice things like he never reads anything, he’s never read a book as an adult. He won’t send texts that are more than a few words. When I send him a long text he gets very quickly overwhelmed, immediately. He asks me to help him write emails or texts.’ Linda was knowingly nodding throughout that and said, ‘yeah so you know what you’re looking for. Well, dyslexia isn’t just about the written word, it’s about processing. You process by writing and reading whereas he might find that a struggle. You can follow a conversation and pick up on things quickly, move with the flow rapidly but he might not pick everything up. When you guys talk about stuff, it might be very important to him but still he’s unable to recall it at a later date, especially if he feels stressed.’ I said, ‘fucking hell this is really blowing my mind. Our brains work completely differently and I’ve been treating him as if he is the same as me and just deliberately not making any effort… fuck! I feel so awful… it’s like forcing a child to hold a pencil and write when they absolutely can’t do it rather than giving them a programme of work on the laptop that would support them in doing the task. Oh I really feel so much compassion for him now… I feel like I could cry.’ Linda said that she could hear that and she knows that Adam and I love each other very much and we are willing to work hard in the relationship. I said, ‘but I feel so ashamed though because this part of me that just wants better and better… like I need to be a better person and I need him to be better too.’ She said, ‘the most important thing there though is that you are aware of that part of you. All you can do is bring awareness. If you had these thoughts and you weren’t aware of them and where they come from then they would get in the way of your relationships but you are aware of that part of you that always wants better.’

I said, ‘oh my god I have so much to go away and read and think about now!’ and she said, ‘yeah, I know you’ll find a lot of information to help you understand this and we can talk more about it. You may even want to talk to Adam about it?’ I said, ‘yeah I definitely will talk to Adam… I actually can’t believe this!’ she said, ‘so it sits well here then?’ she put both hands on the centre of her chest and said, ‘it feels right?’ I said, ‘yeah absolutely… you know because the past 7 years have been so heavily focused on therapy for me, I see everyone through some sort of attachment style/trauma response lens. But this has expanded my way of thinking about and viewing people… like maybe not everyone’s behaviours and thoughts and values are completely impacted by their childhood. Maybe neurodiversity and loads of other things are impacting them too. Of course I know this but I had turned my attention away from all of this and focused on such a small aspect of what makes a person who they are… it’s made me really quick to anger with Adam because I’ve seen his ‘quirks’ as something that could be fixed if only he would go to therapy!’

This is making me think about the session last Saturday when we talked about Adam and how it’s as if I am running ahead, speeding through my healing journey while he is standing still. And I had this amazing Tarot reading a few days ago that aligns with all this. It explored a significant relationship in my life. As she explained our parallel paths within our relationship she said I was operating at a higher frequency to this other soul, possibly because I had lived previous lives where I’d learned the lessons that this person was now facing. She said that I am very focused on my life’s purpose and on making changes to myself, personal development and growth. She said only I would know, gut intuition, if it was my life’s purpose to stay and help this soul with their life’s purpose, or stride ahead and reach a more enlightened state. And I keep seeing repeated symbols of choice. Reaching a fork in the road and having to decide which lane to choose. It’s becoming clearer to me that both roads may actually take me to the same place. But one road is slower, meandering and laboured as I help Adam come with me while the other road is more direct (but not without it’s rocky terrain). I am committed to Adam and I absolutely want to take him with me. Maybe this means going over things a few times, being more patient, having compassion… and when I put it like that, I’m not going to get to my goal by not being those things! Maybe one of the reasons we found each other in this life is for him to teach me to slow down, to be more present and mindful, to be more accepting and to learn to let go of my perfectionism.

I feel like I’ve been blinkered… so focused on childhood psychology and adult trauma survivor stuff that I forgot to lift my head and see the world of complexities that make us all who we are. I seemed to have narrowed my view field down to the belief that the only internal thing that could stop someone from realising their full potential was effort. That if only he wanted to change, he could but he chose not to… which I interpreted as him not loving me enough. Now I am reminded of the need to expand my view point and have compassion and understanding. And that forgiveness shouldn’t be conditional.

As an adult child of a narcissist and a codependent compromising myself kind of comes quite naturally to me… doing anything and everything to make my parents happy, to make them be nice to me. Watching them closely. Figuring them out. The hyper-vigilance woven through every fibre of my child brain. If they were in a bad mood, what had I done wrong? If they were angry, how could I make them happy again? Are they angry…? What is it they’re trying to passive aggressively express to me? This pattern repeats as an adult. Or at least it did until I started unraveling it.

Don’t compromise yourself to make other people love you. Don’t do things you don’t want to do just because the other person will make your life easier if you do it. Don’t let other people hurt you, take you for granted, make fun of you, talk about you behind your back, make you feel inadequate or stupid. Don’t compromise yourself to make others love you. If you do, it’s not really you that they love… it’s your coping strategies and anxious attachment style, the people pleasing. The crippling low self worth and hole in your chest that you need to fill, desperately.

This isn’t about shaming or judging the intense desire to do anything and everything just to make people like/love us. I know because it’s in me. I remember when Anna first taught me about self abandonment. We worked a lot on this over the years and she really helped me understand that you really need to know yourself very well to know when you’re self abandoning. When you’ve had a lifetime of keeping the other person happy and calm, you don’t ever learn how to tune in to your own feelings. It’s that question I’ve struggled so much with in therapy, ‘what do you need?’ What do I need?? I need for you to like me? I need for you to not leave me…? I need to be different? Should I be more like you? What do you think I need? These are all self abandonments. Constantly seeking the other person to make us feel worthy. Looking for ways to be liked, admired, adored, needed, wanted. Looking for ways to be noticed by others so that they tell us the things we need to hear because we can’t feel it inside ourselves… social media and blogging could be a version of this. Depending on how much we feel it defines us. How much we feel we need it. What happens inside us when we don’t get the responses we’re expecting? What happens when we’re questioned or challenged? Is it uncomfortable? Too uncomfortable? Does it feel like a personal attack? Does it feel like a rejection? Is it easy to take feedback that disagrees with our message? Can we have a conversation around these disagreements or do we ignore, delete, shut down? Does positive encouragement and praise feel genuine and congruent? Can we take that in? What happens when we don’t have the feedback we feel we need…?

Anna helped me reflect on all of this. On the need to be secure in my own sense of self… and the reasons why that goal often feels impossible. As a child I wasn’t reflected back, not in a positive way. If ever I was given praise or felt manipulative or sarcastic or had jealous undertones. Or it was taken from me… ‘you get your creativity from me’… that kind of thing. Experiencing this emotional deprivation, this invisibility in my childhood led to me looking for positive affirmation and validation externally. Always. From teachers. From friends. From my parents… still!?? From my therapists. From strangers. I wrote before about one of the many gifts Anna gave me, by keeping herself out of the room she allowed me to find myself. I could no longer use my tried and tested tool to make her like me because I had no idea what she wanted me to be. Although as if by magic, that’s exactly what happened because I guess all she ever wanted was for me to be myself. I learned who I was while sitting in front of her session after session. What I valued, what I liked and didn’t like, what made me feel good, what scared the shit out of me, what made me feel worthy. Where a boundary needed to be installed or firmed up, where I could learn to be more flexible, where the woundings were.

The right people will love you when you are true to yourself. All my life I’ve been playing games trying to bend and contort myself to make people like me but I never felt their love or actually I never felt like I deserved it… it was incongruent. What did they love? Who was this person they loved? It certainly didn’t feel like me. It has taken me years to even begin to scratch the surface on this one. What do I need in relationships? Acceptance. Trust. Clear communication. Personal space. An attentive listener. Validation. Equality. Balance. Respect. Shared joy. Forgiveness. Authenticity. Congruence. Generosity… (and many more). When we constantly squash our own needs, wants, desires – when we ignore that voice inside – we betray ourselves and we unconsciously build up a huge store of resentment and suppressed anger. The anger can pop up in unexpected places (often times at someone that didn’t really deserve it) or at ourselves. That’s been a common theme in my sessions. Tales of all the ways I betray myself and let others betray me. Repeating the abuse. Betraying myself like I was betrayed. Violating my boundaries like they were violated in childhood. So we find ourselves doing very thing for the other person and nothing for ourselves. We martyr ourselves… ‘after everything I’ve done for him he still doesn’t x,y,z.’ If we are not happy doing something we shouldn’t do it. Boundaries! If one of our core beliefs is that we are not as worthy as the other person, we will be stuck in this never ending cycle of trying to please the person enough to make them tell us how worthy we are. We’ll let them betray our boundaries time and again in the hope that will make us worthy… but it never does. It’s quite likely the other person doesn’t even know what’s going on. The only person who is responsible for expressing and demanding respect of my boundaries is me. No shaming here though. It makes sense I would find that fucking hard. That poor little girl who had to dissociate every single feeling away to let other people do what they wanted so that she’d feel a little bit loved… a toxic, fake love.

The only certainty in this life is that my relationship with myself is the longest one I’ll ever have. So the loyalty and love has to begin here. I must not allow myself to push a boundary of mine, to lie to myself, to break my own trust after I’ve made a promise to myself. I’m getting better at drawing a line when I reach my limit of boundary pushing, by others and by myself. When the invalidation, imbalance, jealousy, selfishness, judgement becomes loud I’m able to notice and take a step back. By tuning in to what my body has been telling me all along… ‘these things don’t feel good and I deserve better.’ I don’t have to wait for others to tell me I deserve better… I do already. Only when we really feel this in the core of ourselves, can any outside validation and affirmation touch us. I’ve noticed that in the 2 sessions with Linda… her reassurance, validation and affirmations are going in! And when something doesn’t feel right? I tell her. Slowly slowly learning to have healthy relationships that no longer repeat the patterns of my childhood abuse.

(Apologies this post is long but it was the best session I’ve ever had with Linda and actually may be one of the most profoundly impactful sessions I’ve ever had so I wanted to write as much of it down as possible).

I told Linda that I was feeling good today but that the past few days had been very very hard and although I’m feeling fine today, it would be a good idea to explore what the past few days have been about. I said that I wasn’t even sure why I felt so different today but that it happens quite a lot, feeling awful for a day or a few days and then feeling fine on session day. She asked if I had an idea of why that might happen and I said, ‘It might be a protective thing, avoiding going to the very painful place. So like I can feel my heart pounding right now as I say this as if my mind is saying ‘talk about this’ and my body is saying ‘don’t go near this’ you know?’ She said she totally understood. Then I said, ‘or it could be that I feel okay today because it’s session day, so I know I’m going to be able to connect with someone who gets it… it could be both of those things… or neither!’ I laughed and she laughed and said, ‘yeah I know exactly what you mean Lucy, if we focus on the present moment we could talk about how you’re feeling fine today but then you’d be missing what happened the past few days. Hmmm… so you feel like focusing on the past few days?’ I said, ‘yeah but it’s like talking about a different person, it’s really hard to connect to what was going on for me… especially yesterday I can barely remember what it was like.’ Linda said, ‘okay, would it help if we just go over what you do remember and build on it from there?’ I agreed.

Linda said, ‘so on Wednesday we were talking about Adam and the emotional labour you were putting into the relationship and we talked about Anna…’ I said, ‘so after our session I was in a really dark place, very very sad… lots of crying and just feeling all the grief. I guess I thought I was feeling better about Anna and then it reminded me about all of the pain and the fact that she’s really gone… so yeah the stuff about Adam is really so important to me and I wanted to try to inject what we had been working on into my real life… so I had a couple of big conversations with Adam. We went for a walk and I said to Adam that what happened with Anna was the hardest thing that has ever happened to me, I feel like a broken record coz I’ve said that so many times to you but I haven’t said it to him. I told him that I felt as if this really hard thing happened and he wasn’t in my support toolbox, like he just wasn’t there, but I explained that it’s not really his fault or mine it’s just the way the relationship has developed… I just don’t know how to ask for support and actually don’t even want it, it makes my skin crawl to imagine him being there for me I feel really disgusting and sick to think about being vulnerable with him…’ Linda asked me if I knew what that feeling was about and I said, ‘the thing is Adams a really lovely guy, he’s so so lovely, this isn’t about him but I just can’t figure out what it is about, it’s something psychological, maybe I’m transferring or projecting stuff about my mum onto him I don’t know…’ I continued to explain the conversation, I said, ‘thing is, you know we can never really fully get into things because our conversations are always sandwiched in between the kids interrupting us so we were on a walk and the kids were running off exploring the woods and we’d squeeze in a bit of the chat then one of them would run back to us so the conversation would be put on hold… but anyway, he said to me that he just hoped that Anna would change his mind and come back to me and I was like ‘you and me both mate but it doesn’t look like that’s happening but what is happening right now is that I’m living with this grief and you’re not seeing it.’ I told Adam that I find it really hard to open up to him and he told me he understands that my feelings run deep and that it takes me a while to process things…’ Linda said, ‘what is the fear, Lucy? What is the fear that comes up for you when you imagine being vulnerable with Adam?’ she said I didn’t need to answer if I didn’t want to. That’s something that Anna used to say to me, that there was no pressure to answer them. It really appeals to my avoidant parts, that there’s no pressure and that they’re not violating my privacy. Anyway, I was struggling to find an answer and I repeated under my breath, ‘what am I afraid of?’ I eventually wondered out loud that maybe if I let him see the real me then he will hate me and leave me but then I said ,’but that doesn’t feel exactly right…’ I said, ‘I just remember how overtly emotional my mum was, like hysterical at times…’ Linda was nodding enthusiastically and I continued, ‘and I just remember the pressure to try to make her happy and be there for her, support her… all of my childhood memories are consumed by her Linda, whenever I think about anything it’s as if there’s this giant cardboard cut out of her in front of every memory and whenever I talked about anything as a kid she would tell me something about her life, if I talked about a friend she would talk about one of her friends, if I talked about something I was learning at school she would talk about something she was learning about at school, so my memories became so enmeshed with her memories and there are points where I don’t even know what are my memories and what are hers…’ Linda encouraged me to say more about that and I said, ‘so it feels like I’m scared that if I am vulnerable with Adam, I’ll be being just like her, but I know I’m not like her,’ Linda said, ‘no, you’re nothing like her,’ and I said, ‘but it feels like I’m standing on a cliff edge and if I start to cry I’ll be taking one tiny step forwards but I will plunge into the depths of hysteria and there’s no way back and I’ll be just like her.’

I then started talking about what was going on for me yesterday. I said, ‘I was just so separate and disconnected from them yesterday and these horrible feelings that I hate… I just didn’t want to be around them, the kids and Adam… I mean I must have said a maximum of 50 words all day, out loud. I was just very much in my head all day. I spent a few hours up here, I slept a bit. I sat in the garden listening to music on my headphones. I stayed away from them.’ Linda asked me what I had needed and I told her in needed to be by myself. I said, ‘thing is, I didn’t feel like I do now, it’s hard to even put into words how I felt yesterday, just so empty and like I didn’t want to have to talk to them or do anything, I couldn’t do anything and I feel so awful about that because I’m not being a good mum when I’m like that, it’s like I’m not even there. And that’s not what I want to be, but I don’t feel like I have a choice it’s not a conscious decision to go offline it just happens.

I remember, I mean I’ve had this happen before, this mood or whatever you call it. It comes along every so often and it happened twice in session, this part of me showed up in session with Anna. It was a very stark marked difference to my other sessions. I was very moody and irritable and angry and couldn’t look at her, couldn’t make eye contact and had myself curled up in a ball on my chair and I remember saying to Anna how tight and coiled up I felt and she asked me what it would be like to relax my legs and body and put my feet on the floor and I refused to do it and snapped at her that I didn’t want to. She had smiled and laughed. Later when I was reflecting on it with her I told her I felt teenagery and she had said, ‘yeah I got that’…’ Linda smiled and nodded. She said, ‘so this part that was around for you yesterday, do you know what age you were feeling?’ I said, ‘Fourteen.’ Straight away. Then continued, ‘yeah I got that feeling very strongly towards the evening as I started to feel a bit more like me again, that Fourteen was around, the thoughts of feeling like they would be better off without me and that I should just kill myself, the self harm urges… Anna always said to me to remember the things I can do with the energy when those urges surface – I can draw or write or walk or go out in nature or listen to music or talk to a friend, if the urge to cut is there, so I drew. And what I drew was very teenagery.’ Linda said, ‘and, this might just be me so tell me if it doesn’t resonate but I wonder if, I wonder… does that part know how to parent herself?’ I said, ‘no! exactly, and she doesn’t want to parent these kids either, she isn’t a parent or a wife…’ Linda said, ‘she really needs to be parented doesn’t she.’ I started to feel a lump in my throat and the tears were welling up. I noticed a split second tightening, a ‘don’t cry’ and then I relaxed and let the feelings happen. Through tears I said, ‘yeah she needs a parent and I know that I’m meant to be able to do that for myself but when I’m in that space I just cant do it, I don’t have a connection to this part of me that can mother. Linda said, ‘so would it be fair to say when you are in that space, there is no connection between the different parts? A complete disconnect?’ I said, ‘yeah. Its like… well if I think about the analogies I’ve shared before… well there’s the corridor with the doors… but there’s another analogy that I’ve used before with Anna, so it’s like I’m a bus and different parts of me drive the bus and then everyone else is just along for the ride. So yesterday Fourteen had taken the wheel and no one else has a say, you now?’ Linda was really looking right at me and nodding a lot and she said, ‘and there’s no warning, there’s no discussion about who takes the wheel it just happens!’ and I was like, wow she fucking gets it! I was staring out the window and then Linda said, ‘Lucy, what’s happening for you right now?’ and I was like, ‘uhhhhmmmm…. uh… I guess I’m feeling a bit spacey.’ And she said, ‘okay yes, hmmm… are there any parts around for you today?’ I was so grateful to her for asking. I told her that I felt fuzzy and that maybe because we were talking about her, Fourteen was around.

Then someone knocked on the front door and I had to leap off the bed and run downstairs and answer it because Adam and the kids were out at the park and I was waiting for a deliver. When I got back Linda asked if everything was okay and I explained. My heart was pounding and I had to calm myself a bit. I said I couldn’t remember what I was talking about and she said, ‘the parts that are around just now.’ I said, ‘when I’m in the space I was in yesterday, I take myself away from Adam and the kids because there isn’t a single part of me that wants to engage with them, you know? There are these feelings of like ‘god get away from me, it’s always about you and your needs’ when I’m in that mood and with the kids and I hate feeling like that, they’re my kids for god sake! But when I’m in that space they don’t feel like my kids and he doesn’t feel like my husband, they’re just these people I have to live with and I hate it I want them all to go away.’ Linda said, ‘so, yeah, that makes a lot of sense, so you’re feeling what, is it resentful or the kids? Resentful and begrudging..?’ I said, ‘I think it’s jealousy.’ she said, in the most compassionate tone, ‘jealousy.’ And I felt my heart breaking. I said, ‘you know, I really want to do what’s right for the kids and I work so hard at it, so when I’m feeling that horrible numb spacey way, disconnected, I go into robotic mode. Anna and I worked a lot on this in the early days because I didn’t know how to play with the kids. You have to be so present with children, they demand it of you… but being present with them just totally broke my heart so I would play with them but I’d dissociate and go through the motions in a really robotic way so I could get through playing with them without it hurting. So Anna encouraged me to do it a bit at a time, really slowly drip feeding… and I would play for a little and be present and then I’d have to leave the room because I’d burst into tears.’ I started to cry while I was talking and said, ‘I don’t remember ever playing, as a kid… I don’t remember the carefree joy that I see in my kids, and I want them to be carefree, I want them to be joyous… but there’s this painful longing and jealousy, so I shut off to it all.’

Linda said, ‘could you let them hug you, when you’re feeling like that?’ I said, ‘the kids?’ and she nodded and said ‘uhu’ and I felt myself snap into the teen feelings and said angrily, ‘no, fucking hell no, I could never let them do that…’ she said, ‘why not?’ and I said, ‘because I remember what that feels like and I never want to make them feel like that,’ I started sobbing, head down with my hands over my face. Linda made a sound that felt like complete attunement and said, ‘oh Lucy… you are not your mum. You are not your mum.’ I said, ‘If I cry like this with them and make them comfort me than I would be just like her, I never want to make them feel responsible for my feelings.’ I cried for a couple of minutes. I can’t explain just how miraculous it feels to me that I am actually crying in a session with a therapist I have never even sat in the same room as. Considering how hard it has always been for me to cry. When I first started therapy with Paul I never cried. Then when I started with Anna I cried but always silently and always by myself, shrouded in shame. Now I am actually crying while someone is watching me on a computer screen and she can hear me crying through the microphone which is right by my mouth going right into her ears… all of this crosses my mind fleetingly as it’s happening. I eventually calmed down and complained about the fact that today of all days I decided to wear mascara that is not waterproof. I said, ‘When Adam hugs me I completely numb out, I just can’t let myself feel any of it. I leave myself. I want to feel it but I can’t. I so strongly feel that I don’t want to cross the line and be too demanding, too emotional, too needy… so I shut it all down and be nothing. And… god it’s the last thing I want. I’m so desperate to be nothing like my mother that I…’ I started crying again, ‘I’m so frightened of fucking up my kids that I create this distance between us, in case I pollute them or something just by being near me, just by knowing me, I’m so determined to not fuck them up when that’s actually what I am doing… by creating so much space between us I am hurting them. I imagine when the kids look back on their memories of this time they’ll barely even remember me being here.’ At this point I was sobbing into tissue and I’d taken my right ear piece out so the microphone wasn’t right by my sniffing nose. She was saying things like, ‘they want to know you, Lucy. They want to be close to their mummy. They want to know who their mummy is.’ While still crying I looked up and said, ‘I don’t even know who I am.’ She had this agonisingly compassionate expression on her face and the sympathetic lips pressed together smile she does where her eyebrows go up in the middle. She said, ‘oh Lucy, you do know yourself… I think after 7 years of therapy you know yourself very very well.’ On reflection now I’m thinking that parts of me are known well, some parts are unexplored. I think maybe that’s what I was meaning.

I said, ‘I’ve really failed them, Linda, I’ve really neglected them…’ Linda said, ‘Lucy, I do want to remind you that the past few months have been anything but normal, the past few months have been very hard… all being together for such an intense and long period of time.’ I said, ‘it really has been so hard. But I just feel like if I look back on this time in a few years or like say when Reuben’s going to high school I’ll look back at this time and think, ‘what a fucking waste of time that you will never get back, you had months with those kids and what did you do, you obsessed about some fucking therapist that you weren’t even working with any more and you moped about depressed ignoring everyone!? You know?’ Linda said, ‘hmmm… firstly, that’s very unkind Lucy, a very unkind thing to say to yourself…’ I started to well up, again. She continued, ‘and secondly, you have never experienced anything like this before, you have been surviving any way you can.’ I said, ‘I have spent so much of the past few months shutting myself away from the kids, I’m going to look back and really regret that I didn’t make the most of this time we have. I hear how some of my friends have talked about this time in lockdown, they talked about how it’s been such an amazing gift to have all this time together.’ Linda said, ‘this may be my shit, my cynical part but when I hear people talking like that I just think, ‘aye right… really? Loved every minute of this have you?’ haha.’ I said, ‘My friend Chloe, she left teaching a few years ago to be a stay at home mum and she’s been talking about how much fun she’s had with her kids, she’s been doing loads of home baking, she’s made home cooked meals every day, she’s done crafts with the kids every day and just loving every minute of her time with them. They’ll look back on this time as the happiest memories.’ Linda said, ‘she isn’t going through what you’re going through though. Is she having to fight through what you are? Is she in therapy?’ I shook my head and stared out the window. There was some quiet and then Linda asked me what had come up for me in that moment. I said, ‘I think… it’s not fair…’ I started to cry again… ‘it’s not fair that I have to fight this battle before I even consider doing normal parenting things. I do all the stuff Chloe does but I do it very sporadically, I do crafts, I bake, I make home cooked meals but it’s every so often not every day… it’s not fair that I’ve had all of this to deal with it makes life so much harder.’ Linda was really empathetic and said, ‘it really is not fair and it makes sense that every day things are so much harder for you because you are having to deal with therapy and losing Anna and everything else you’re dealing with. Lucy, you are using this comparison to shame and hurt yourself, you are weaponizing the comparison, aren’t you?’ I said it was true and told her that I felt very strongly that that’s the type of mum I want to be but I just can’t do it.

There was a moment of quiet and then Linda said, ‘I want to make an observation but this may not be the right time, can you let me know if this doesn’t land for you, is that okay?’ I said it was and she said, ‘all of this… it’s about connection, for you. It is all feeling connected and staying connected.’ I looked at her and looked away and said, ‘it hurts to be connected to people, it makes me connect to myself and that’s painful…’ I started to cry and through the tears, while not looking at her I said, ‘this is mortifying.’ There was a moment of me quietly crying and her not talking then she said, ‘why are you mortified, Lucy?’ I said, ‘crying in front of you.’ Linda said, ‘you’ve cried with me before.’ I said, ‘but not about this stuff, not like this… crying about Anna is different to crying about me.’ Linda said, ‘I know.’ I cried some more and Linda gently said, ‘I see you Lucy. I see you crying and I’m staying with you, I’m still connected to you.’ That felt so fucking powerful, it was amazing. I whispered, ‘thank you,’ and then drifted back to looking out the window. Linda asked what was going on for me and I told her I felt spacey. I then quite quickly said, ‘there must be something glaringly obvious about me that you therapists can spot, you are noticing it… Paul and Anna and you all have pointed it out to me, that connection is a big thing for me, Anna used to come back to it repeatedly in sessions and she would ask me how the connection felt, she’d say ‘do you feel me in the room with you, how does the connection feel…’ you know?’ Linda was kind of wide eyed and looking intrigued and I said, ‘I mean I guess you guys sit with so many different people so it must be really obvious to you when someone has a particular pattern so for me it’s connection…’ I felt energised and focused and Linda said very directly, ‘You’re moved into your head, Lucy. I just want to bring your awareness to that. There was a very obvious shift there, you’ve moved into your head. Is it okay that I’m pointing that out to you? I just noticed it very acutely, you disconnected in that moment and moved into your head.’ I wasn’t expecting her to say that and I felt myself searching her face. Eventually I said, ‘it’s the shame… the shame pushes me to disconnect. All the emotions feel overwhelming but shame is unbearable.’ Linda asked me what I was ashamed about and I said, ‘…how difficult is it to stay connected to people? What kind of weirdo can’t stay connected to themselves or others? I’m ashamed that I’m so broken.’ And the tears came again. Linda met my critical voice with compassion and then said, ‘I just want to go back to something you were talking about earlier. I’m going to ask you something but feel free to bat it out the court if it doesn’t sit right… is that okay?’ I nodded and she asked, ‘when you were in the woods with Adam, and you guys were talking, what did you need from him?’ This has got to be the hardest question ever in therapy… what do I need. It’s still so hard despite being asked to analyse and dive into this question many times over the years. I said, ‘When I’m feeling like that, really low, my gut reaction is to always ask for space. To ask Adam to take the kids and give me peace.’ Linda was nodding, it was the sort of ‘keep going’ type nodding. I said, ‘but it’s almost like, it’s like I’m repeating a pattern or something when I do that because then I get further into the isolation. Like I’m saying, ‘I’m in this awful mood and it’s unbearable and I’m too much for everyone and you all need to leave me along… or I need to be on my own…’ like a punishment or…?’ Linda said, ‘so your gut instinct is to ask for space but what do you think you really need?’ I said, ‘for him to be there for me? To be with me? To not be on my own?’ Linda said, ‘and what is the fear, if you were to ask him for help, what might happen?’ I said, ‘that he wont get it, he wont attune to me, he wont know how bad it feels for me or it will get too much for him and he’ll send me away to be by myself…’ Linda said, ‘just like when you were little and you were too much and they’d send you to your room to be by yourself. You’re frightened that Adam will send you to your room, punish you for feeling.’ At this point I cried so hard, like it was pouring out of the centre of my chest. Linda quietly said, ‘I’m here Lucy.’ Which felt painful and beautiful. Like being hugged through a screen… by a person doesn’t do hugs! I could really feel her support. After I calmed down I said, ‘so when I feel down, I punish myself by sending myself to my room to be alone, preempting that I will be sent away into isolation if I reach out for help. I reject myself before anyone else can reject me.’ Linda was nodding.

At some point when I was talking about being afraid to let the kids know me, Linda said, ‘my dad died twenty years ago, I don’t have any memories of him. I didn’t like him very much but that’s another story entirely but my point is, it doesn’t have to be one thing or the other, there is a grey area, the kids don’t have to know all of you or none of you, they can know parts of you, bits and pieces.’ I didn’t really understand what she meant by the comparison to her dad but I do agree with her on the binary thinking trap that I keep falling into. I’m so scared to be so extremely like my mum where she had no filter and was overpowering with her presence that I am diluting myself to the extreme so as to almost white wash myself out of their memories. But I can be somewhere in the middle.

I can’t remember how we got onto this but I said, ‘there’s something so heartbreaking about kids and how they have no inhibitions, no self consciousness… the other day a memory popped up on facebook from two years ago when we were fruit picking and Reuben was 2 yeas old. He’s in the background of the photo, totally oblivious to the fact that anyone can see him. I’m taking a photo of Grace who is smiling for the camera and he’s on his tiptoes in the background reaching a berry high up. I could cry my eyes out at that photo… the fact that he is just very present and he’s focused solely on picking that fruit… I don’t even know how to describe it.’ Linda was smiling and nodding and said she knew exactly what I meant and so I continued, ‘my kids love stripping down to their pants and dancing round the livingroom to music and they have absolutely no self awareness or self consciousness at all, they just enjoy the music and like bask in this safe, innocent, joyful loving environment, you know? They’re thriving. And I want them to thrive. I want them to be innocent and joyful and it’s so beautiful but it makes me ache inside. I don’t remember ever being like that, so carefree. I always knew, even when I was tiny, that I needed to be careful how I behaved around mum, that I shouldn’t be naked around her, I should look a certain way. I was always thinking about what I needed to behave like for her to not be mean to me… but I guess that can be saved for another time!’ I’d noticed we had 2 minutes to go. Linda smiled and said it was nice to hear about the kids and also that she understood what I was sharing about my childhood.

Linda said, ‘How are you feeling now? Do you feel connected?’ I said, ‘to you or to myself?’ and she said, ‘hmmm… both!’ and I thought, I looked at her and checked in with myself and said, ‘yeah, actually I do feel connected, I feel okay!’ we smiled at each other and I said, ‘thank you so much for this Linda, I’ve never been able to do that before, I’ve never talked and cried about my childhood like this, this has been really powerful, making the connections between…’ I interrupted myself and laughed and said, ‘well I don’t need to precise the session in the last twenty seconds… it was all really useful and important and I’m really glad this is what we talked about today.’ She did a sort of laugh smile and said, ‘you’re welcome, I’m really glad. It did feel very important and I feel connected to you too.’

I have felt so good since the video call ended. Emotional but also kind of euphoric. I feel hopeful and like we’re on the right track. I really felt like Linda was confident in the way she navigated me through this session. It felt deeply connecting. I am so grateful to her for tuning in so specifically to the parts work, to Fourteen. I’m also astounded at how I was able to move into the emotions and stay with them. I never ever thought it was possible for me to cry in front of someone like this, let alone cry about my childhood and to connect so deeply to the pain of it. And to be able to do this on a video call with a therapist I didn’t choose to work with and have never met in person. I am just so grateful that this work is working. So profoundly grateful to Linda and to myself for sticking at this when really all I wanted to do at times was give up and walk away from it all.

This afternoon has been such a joy. I have felt so much more connected to Adam. We played with the kids for a couple of hours in the garden and they both had fun on their roller skates. We listened to music and danced around a bit and I felt comfortable and safe with them all. We cooked dinner together and ate it as a family and laughed and chatted. I spent a few minutes looking around the table and really soaking it all up, taking it all in. I thought to myself, ‘they want me to be here, they want to know their mummy… I feel connected to them and it feels safe and I feel full of love.’

I slept in. Massively! It was just after 11am when Adam came in with coffee and opened the curtains. Let the sun stream in. It’s beyond a joke, I don’t know what the hell is going on with me and sleep right now. Since Anna stopped working with me my will to be routined and disciplined has just disintegrated. I stay up until sometimes 3am and then sleep poorly and then can’t wake up when the kids get up (which is usually 7am). It’s so unlike me. I’ve been reflecting on what is up with me. I’m not depressed… I’ve thought a lot about it. Depression and grief masquerade as the same thing… similar symptoms. Makes you wonder if depression is just unprocessed grief. I need to talk to Linda about this but I’m certain it’s grief mixed with needing time by myself (hence staying up late when everyone’s asleep) and then a reluctance to spend time with Adam and the kids (hence sleeping in). To be honest this is completely bizarre for me. The only time I remember being like this was when I was a teenager. I tried so hard at the start of this pandemic to be Superhuman and I think I burned myself out. ‘Lockdown fatigue’ Linda called it… but all my adult life I’ve worked so hard at making sure everyone is okay and especially in recent years working harder than ever trying to do everything perfectly for the kids and then I guess I just hit a brick wall. Losing Anna was like losing my lifeline and I just collapsed. I couldn’t do any of it for anyone anymore. And now I’m doing none of it. I feel like I’m barely making any effort with anyone or anything. I’m not eating properly, not doing any of the good things I know I should be doing. It’s so hard.

The session was at 12 noon. I told Linda I’d only been awake for an hour. We made some chit chat about it being cold for July and I had a cardi on that she pointed out and she told me she’d turned the heating on… the usual Scottish weather banter. Then she asked how I’d been since the last session. I said I could remember the jist of what we’d talked about but not the details. I told her that my birthday had been the best I’d ever had and explained what had happened. One of the things I told her which I haven’t journaled about yet is the conversation I had with Adam a few weeks ago. I told him that I wanted him to involve the kids in choosing and buying me birthday presents because it’s a lovely thing for the kids to experience. I told Linda that he doesn’t really do presents, hadn’t ever really got me anything for my birthday before and she was like, ‘woahhh what? What do you mean he doesn’t do presents?’ I said, ‘well I think I’ve always just told him that I can buy myself anything I want and to not bother… I think he’s probably worried he’d get me a shit gift.’ Linda said, ‘what exactly is a shit gift?’ I thought for a bit then said, ‘a present that shows you don’t know the person at all.’ She nodded and I explained, ‘a few weeks ago Adam asked me if I wanted him to get me something or do something for my birthday and I said that actually I did want that. He asked me what I wanted and I told him that what I really wanted was for him to choose something. He said he was really struggling with that and asked me for help. I asked him to tell me three things he knows about me and he said, ‘you’re my wife, you’re a mum and you’re a teacher’ and I was so disappointed and angry, I was like ‘those are just roles I play in my life they’re not who I am!!!’ Eventually I coaxed it out of him, coached him through realising some things about me… that I love astrology, the moon, crystals, beautiful crafts, drawing, psychology, aromatherapy, illustration, make up. Anyway, even after that conversation a week later he asked me to go over it again with him and I refused, I told him to think about it.’ Linda was listening and smiling occasionally. I continued, ‘So then comes my birthday and you know he really pulled it off! He tried very very hard. He painted a beautiful painting for me that’s a copy of a painting I love of a little white cottage on a Scottish Island. He gave me a crystal and some aromatherapy oils and a phone cover with the moon cycle on it and made my favourite meals on my birthday… so yeah he really did try. He asked, he listened and he tried. But of course there’s the part of me that’s annoyed that after 19 years I have to do any of that at all. But maybe I haven’t been forthcoming enough. I’m very self protective and closed off.’ We talked a lot about that and Linda said she was glad my birthday was so lovely. I told her that I really believe that by allowing myself to feel all the grief I’ve been able to let all the other feelings be felt. That I really felt loved on my birthday. She was so pleased to hear that.

We talked about other things that escape me right now. I told her that Adam didn’t really understand my grief and that he would say things to me that made me realise he didn’t get it, which hurts and makes me feel like he doesn’t love me. Linda asked if I keep myself from reaching out to him because I don’t want him to fail and I said, ‘yes, because failing means he hasn’t tried, which means he doesn’t really care.’ I told her that I tried to explain to Adam that Anna leaving is worse than if my mum had died because she was such a powerful force of good in my life and I saw her so often and loved her so much… that losing my mum would be no real loss. Linda said, ‘I remember you saying that to me and it really stayed with me, I really felt it and I know it’s true, I hear you.’ At one point I said, ‘I miss her so much still Linda, I think about her every day. She’s still the first thing I think about when I wake up and I think about her before I fall asleep and you know she’s everywhere. I scroll down my messages a bit and there is her thread of texts and if I look at my calls list, 19^th of May there’s her name, the last time she’ll ever call me… and when I pay for my sessions with you on my digital banking, her name is there in the list of payees… there she is. I carry her with me all the time, and not in a morbid way either, she’s this ‘what would Anna say’ idea in my mind, this voice or sense of support inside me… there’s good along with the grief.’ Linda was smiling and nodding and agreeing. I could feel her supporting me and that she understood but she didn’t take me deeper into the feelings.

She asked specifically about how I was after the last session and I said it triggered a big conversation with Adam about me and the emotional labour I feel I am doing. She asked what would happen with Adam and what would it feel like for me if I just stopped carrying all the emotional labour. I said it would be like watching a car crash happen and she reacted in a really massive way saying things like, ‘Oh my god Lucy, a car crash!!’ I said, ‘wow the way you’ve reacted makes me feel like that analogy was a bit much,’ she said, ‘well it’s really a very powerful analogy,’ I said, ‘well let me think of a better one… it’s slower than a car crash, maybe it’s like watching someone drown… slowly… why would you watch someone drown when you know you can help them?’ I told Linda about the time I walked in on Adam preparing his work clothes for the next day and how he jokingly tied a noose round his neck with his belt and how I had pleaded with him to never joke about that. It sparked a very serious conversation about how he had in fact considered taking his life at points, mostly when Grace was a baby. I said to Linda, ‘I know I’m not responsible for his healing and his mental health but I love him and don’t want to lose him, or leave him behind.’ She recalled the analogy of me running ahead and him staying standing still. As I’m typing this I had a thought… I don’t want to leave him behind, do I really need to move so fast? What am I running from? I know that I think I’m running towards some sort of ‘healing goal’… but what am I running from? Surely I’d rather get to the ‘finish line’ later but with him, rather than sooner but without him?

I told her that everything has changed since Anna left. That everything was fine before. I said, ‘my relationship with Adam was really great before,’ she said, ‘and how do you gauge that, Lucy? How do you gauge that your relationship was so much better before?’ I said, ‘hmmm… how do I gauge it? Well… I mean the first thing that comes to mind is uh… how much is too much information?’ she didn’t respond so I said, ‘right well… I mean… how do I gauge that my relationship was great before… a lot of really great sex… to be honest… all the time, every day usually… really great sex. And uh… then that all just stopped.’ Linda said, ‘okay so what is it like now?’ I said, ‘I don’t want it now, it’s like… what happened with Anna was the most painful thing that’s ever happened to me as an adult and he was completely absent from my care circle, you know? He just didn’t know how to support me and I mean, he would have done whatever I asked him to do but I just didn’t have it in me to coach him through that! I was in the worst pain I didn’t then want to have to teach him how to help me… so a wall grew between us.’ Linda said, ‘yeah and we’ve talked about your anger, anger is a great wall, it gets in the way of things, when you’re angry with him you’re obviously not going to want to have sex with him.’ I said, ‘the sex was the best part of our relationship. I’m really not great with emotional intimacy but I can do physical intimacy. We’re really great together. Going from having a lot of physical loving and affection and lots of sex to nothing for so long, well I mean I think we’ve had sex three times in the past 7 weeks which is a marked difference you know. Now h’s saying things like, ‘do you still love me, are you still attracted to me, don’t you fancy me anymore… which is driving me nuts! And the week Anna dieeee… ooh my god that was a Freudian slip!’ Linda said, ‘oooh wow yes!’ and I said, ‘it really was like she died though!’ and Linda said, ‘yes I know, one minute she’s there and then she just vanished, gone.’ We sat with that for a minute then I said, ‘When she called and finished with me, I didn’t want to do anything that brought me back to my body, I was in this fog… and then I was on the meds, the Diazepam killed my sex drive I think and the propranolol made it really hard to eh… to climax… so it was just this foggy, loveless, joyless mess… and then I just shut off to it, pushed him away… there was no desire in me to be physically close to him… then when it was my birthday we did end up doing it coz I think I just didn’t want to fight it anymore. But I didn’t want to do it. And I felt gross and yuck… I hated myself for having sex with him when i didn’t want to because it just, it’s horrible. I hate feeling like this but I don’t know how to move past it. How can I move past this?’ Linda said, ‘hmmm I guess it’s about drawing your attention to the anger, which you are doing, and talking about it, and working with that… that’s what is standing in your way, that’s the wall between you and Adam.’ We talked a bit more about that. I said I felt really embarrassed and that it was cringey to talk about this.

Then she said, ‘what has happened in the past when you’ve been emotionally vulnerable with Adam, when you’ve cried with him?’ I said, ‘I haven’t really… I mean I’ve been upset about certain things like when our cats died or when a relative died but I’ve not gone to him for support in those moments I just dealt with it myself or went to Anna. That’s not true I have cried with him in the dark, silently… I imagine you have a very different view of me because I seemingly have easily opened up to you and cried with you but that’s not what I’ve ever been like before.’ She said, ‘I know, you made a conscious decision to feel it in our sessions and express it and be open with me, I know that, and it’s helped you grieve and process. What would happen if you did go to him?’ I said, ‘I don’t think he’d do or say what I need… he doesn’t know how.’

At some point I said, ‘I just wish it would all go back to the way it was before.’ She said, ‘hmmm, yeah, and sadly it can’t go back to the way it was before, but what we can do is keep moving forwards, things can change and the future can be different to how it feels now, can’t it?’ I nodded slowly and looked out the window. She asked how I was feeling in this moment and I couldn’t really think, I felt a bit spacey. I told her I was sad and embarrassed. I said, ‘I’m so ashamed and I hate this part of me and I think about all the stuff I’ve read about narcissists and how they withhold love and sex to punish their partners and I don’t want to be like that I don’t want to be like her at all I don’t want to be like my mum but then I think I’m not doing it to punish him I’m doing it because I need to protect myself.’ Linda said, ‘I think the key is to bring awareness to that, yeah? To just bring awareness to it. I know a part of you thinks you might be like your mum and you absolutely don’t want to be like her. And I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again, you are not your mum Lucy, yeah? You are not your mum. I know you are frightened that you might be like her but you are not.’ She did this really beautiful warm smile she sometimes does that really feels very caring. It was nice.

There was a bit of quiet at the end and I said I felt overwhelmed. I said, ‘this is all a lot.’ She said, ‘and I’ve noticed that today, just like on Saturday, you stuck with one subject, you didn’t jump around from one subject to another, you’ve stayed with Adam and Anna. I wonder if that’s why you’re really feeling it today.’ I said that was an interesting observation. I felt very floaty. It was 12.50 and she asked me what I was doing this weekend. I talked about the kids for a minute then we ended the video call. Oh and as we were ending the call I thanked her as I always do, except I started to call her Anna! I said, ‘okay, thanks AaaaI’ll see you Wednesday…’ She may have noticed… it was fairly noticeable! I was so embarrassed. The whole things was very overwhelming and just too much for me.

I’ve spent the afternoon typing and crying and looking at Anna’s texts and emails. I just can’t believe she’s really gone from my life. I didn’t even know this grief was around for me today but it has been massively present. There aren’t the words to adequately express how painful and how lacking any power I feel. I am not allowed to talk to her any more. I can’t reach out to her. She is still alive yet she is dead to my life. It’s hit me like a train again today. I ache and long for her. I really need a cuddle from her so much. I find myself fantasising about her texting me telling me she’s suddenly fine and is starting up her practice again. I just can’t believe she’s gone.

Crossroads, Intentions and Schemas

I’m at some sort of therapeutic cross roads right now. Who knows what is further down the road for me. I don’t know if Linda will be right for me long term… this has caused a huge amount of heart ache and uncertainty over the past couple of months, on top of the grief I’ve been going through, but I realised more recently that there really isn’t a desperate need to make any urgent decisions about that. I know that working with her right now is what I need to do. And I think that’s one of the most powerful things I’ve learned through all of this… that we really don’t know what is going to happen in the future, tomorrow or in years to come, but we have this moment right now. That’s all we have. So, in this moment, I need Linda and I’m grateful I have her.

It’s been 7 weeks since Anna called me to end our work and every single day of those 7 weeks I have woken up thinking about her and gone to sleep thinking about her. She is everywhere, all day. But not always in a painful way. Quite often she accompanies me in moments where I need encouragement or a sense of safety. She coaches me from the sidelines in my mind. I don’t remember her and feel the loss and abandonment, I remember her and feel her love. She broke my heart wide open when she left and in doing so she let me experience everything. All the feelings. I gave myself permission to experience and become absorbed in the uncensored and all consuming expression of grief as a way of loving her from a distance. In doing this I have learned something I never would have discovered had she not gone. That to feel anything, we have to feel everything. I wholeheartedly believe this to be true. I have read and been told that you can’t numb one feeling or ‘just the bad feelings’ – if you numb them then you numb them all. The minute I decided to feel the grief, though it felt like it might kill me, it awakened me to the love.

This ‘crossroads’ which isn’t really a crossroads, it’s more of a change or a side step or a new fork in the road… whatever it is, it has made me reflect and in doing so I’ve revisited some of my old session notes. My friend reminded me how important it is to look back, to draw parallels and build self awareness which can help with feelings of stuckness in therapy. It’s like we’re staring at a wall so long we can’t even see the room we’re in anymore, we have to turn around and view things from all sorts of different angles… I’ve been thinking about my journey and what my life looks like now – what progress have I made, what more do I want to focus on, what keeps coming up for me, what am I avoiding?

I remember being so fascinated when Paul presented me with the results to my Schema questionnaire back in 2013. It was the first step towards knowing myself on a deeper level and realising that the way I was made sense and was a familiar pattern for people who had similar experiences to me. It was a major catalyst in what would be a long lasting hunger to learn and understand the psychology behind childhood trauma and it’s impacts.

I’ve been thinking quite a lot about intention. The fact that if we want change there needs to be a deep realisation that something HAS to change, then the intention to make the changes, then I guess maybe the courage to ask for help, trust that the help will in fact be available… then we have to take the leap. We have to make the step outside the comfort zone, we have to MAKE THE CHANGE. This has been going round and round in my mind for a while now, this idea of making the change. Not doing the same thing I’ve always done. I did that with Linda and it has made so much difference to how the therapy feels. I decided from the first session to drop my guard because if I was going to get anything out of our sessions I needed to come to them uncensored and lacking all defences. Anna would call them the games people play being a Transactional Analysist. The way I approached therapy with both Paul and Anna with fear and the assumption I would be hurt and shamed. With Linda I feel like I marched into the early sessions with no intention of absorbing any shame, I just wanted to talk openly about how I was feeling and I trusted that I’d be able to ensure my own safety and get my needs met.

Along the lines of thinking about schemas, I’m reflecting on how my birthday felt yesterday. It was distinctly different to any other birthday and I think the biggest shift has been in noticing my repeating patterns and making a conscious decision to choose a different route. Birthdays were always very disappointing for me as a child and quite often filled with guilt, shame and loneliness. I learned that I was a burden and that I didn’t deserve to have what I wanted or even ask for anything. I must make myself small and not have needs. In my twenties I partied and drank my way through my birthdays with various nights out and house parties that were a lot of fun but always ended with me feeling very empty or desperately grief stricken… lots of drunk crying. In my thirties birthdays have been quieter yet still disappointing. Under the guise of being focused on my children.

The past two years I worked on birthdays with Anna and she helped me see the patterns. One cycle I was repeating was based around the belief that I am not worthy of attention or love. That I must not ask for anything or have needs. Just as I was taught as a child. I would proclaim that I didn’t want a fuss and tell people not to get me anything then I would end up disappointed with the empty non event that my birthday would be. Martyrdom. As a result I’d feel guilty for feeling disappointed when actually it was what I asked for in the first place. People aren’t psychic. We can’t expect them to guess what we really mean. I was repeating the abuse I’d experienced because it felt comfortable. It confirmed my core belief that I am not worthy of positive attention, that people feel burdened by me and that in order to be lovable I must never ask for anything and never expect anything. This year I committed to making the changes that Anna instigated. I had honest conversations with the people close to me about what would make me happy. Then I made a conscious decision to let the love in. To let people attend to me. To receive with open gratitude. And to connect with any inner children that were present. I did just that and I had the best birthday I’ve ever had. I’ll share some of the notes I wrote to my inner children in another post. But I want to explore the schemas more here just now.

“There are 18 Early Maladaptive Schemas which are core themes that we repeat through our lives. The most basic concept in Schema Therapy is an Early Maladaptive Schema – “broad, pervasive themes regarding oneself and one’s relationship with others, developed during childhood and elaborated throughout one’s lifetime, and dysfunctional to a significant degree.”

Early Maladaptive Schemas began with something that was done to us by our families or by other children, which damaged us in some way. We might have been abandoned, criticized, overprotected, emotionally or physically abused, excluded or deprived.

Schemas fight to stay alive. We distort our view of the events in our lives in order to maintain the validity of our schemas. Schemas may remain dormant until they are activated. Schemas are like tsunamis. They remain dormant until an earthquake erupts under the surface to trigger your schema(s) and then you behave in ways that are extreme or inappropriate for the situation. 

My core schemas are. UNRELENTING STANDARDS / HYPERCRITICALNESS, ABANDONMENT /  INSTABILITY, EMOTIONAL DEPRIVATION (I’ll copy them all in at the end.) Once we know what our main schemas are (there are books and maybe even websites with questionnaires to help us figure out what we need to focus on) then we can work at repairing those areas. There is so much power in knowing ourselves. SO much strength in being able to focus on the areas we want to change.”

“Schema Domains
We have grouped these 18 schemas into 5 broad developmental categories of schemas that we call schema domains. Each of the five domains represents an important component of a child’s core needs. Schemas interfere with the child’s attempts to get the core needs met within each domain.

DISCONNECTION & REJECTION
(Expectation that one’s needs for security, safety, stability, nurturance, empathy, sharing of feelings, acceptance, and respect will not be met in a predictable manner. Typical family origin is detached, cold, rejecting, withholding, lonely, explosive, unpredictable, or abusive.)

1. ABANDONMENT / INSTABILITY (AB)
The perceived instability or unreliability of those available for support and connection.
Involves the sense that significant others will not be able to continue providing emotional support, connection, strength, or practical protection because they are emotionally unstable and unpredictable (e.g., angry outbursts), unreliable, or erratically present; because they will die imminently; or because they will abandon the patient in favor of someone better.

2. MISTRUST / ABUSE (MA)
The expectation that others will hurt, abuse, humiliate, cheat, lie, manipulate, or take advantage. Usually involves the perception that the harm is intentional or the result of unjustified and extreme negligence. May include the sense that one always ends up being cheated relative to others or “getting the short end of the stick.”

3. EMOTIONAL DEPRIVATION (ED)
Expectation that one’s desire for a normal degree of emotional support will not be adequately met by others. The three major forms of deprivation are:
A. Deprivation of Nurturance: Absence of attention, affection, warmth, or companionship.
B. Deprivation of Empathy: Absence of understanding, listening, self-disclosure, or mutual sharing of feelings from others.
C. Deprivation of Protection: Absence of strength, direction, or guidance from others.

4. DEFECTIVENESS / SHAME (DS)
The feeling that one is defective, bad, unwanted, inferior, or invalid in important respects; or that one would be unlovable to significant others if exposed. May involve hypersensitivity to criticism, rejection, and blame; self-consciousness, comparisons, and insecurity around others; or a sense of shame regarding one’s perceived flaws. These flaws may be private (e.g., selfishness, angry impulses, unacceptable sexual desires) or public (e.g., undesirable physical appearance, social awkwardness)

5. SOCIAL ISOLATION / ALIENATION (SI)
The feeling that one is isolated from the rest of the world, different from other people, and/or not part of any group or community.

IMPAIRED AUTONOMY & PERFORMANCE
(Expectations about oneself and the environment that interfere with one’s perceived ability to separate, survive, function independently, or perform successfully. Typical family origin is enmeshed, undermining of child’s confidence, overprotective, or failing to reinforce child for performing competently outside the family.)

6. DEPENDENCE / INCOMPETENCE (DI)
Belief that one is unable to handle one’s everyday responsibilities in a competent manner, without considerable help from others (e.g., take care of oneself, solve daily problems, exercise good judgment, tackle new tasks, make good decisions). Often presents as helplessness.

7. VULNERABILITY TO HARM OR ILLNESS (VH)
Exaggerated fear that imminent catastrophe will strike at any time and that one will be unable to prevent it. Fears focus on one or more of the following: (A) Medical Catastrophes: e.g., heart attacks, AIDS; (B) Emotional Catastrophes: e.g., going crazy; (C) External Catastrophes: e.g., elevators collapsing, victimized by criminals, airplane crashes, earthquakes.

8. ENMESHMENT / UNDEVELOPED SELF (EM)
Excessive emotional involvement and closeness with one or more significant others (often parents), at the expense of full individuation or normal social development. Often involves the belief that at least one of the enmeshed individuals cannot survive or be happy without the constant support of the other. May also include feelings of being smothered by, or fused with, others OR insufficient individual identity. Often experienced as a feeling of emptiness and floundering, having no direction, or in extreme cases questioning one’s existence.

9. FAILURE (FA)
The belief that one has failed, will inevitably fail, or is fundamentally inadequate relative to one’s peers, in areas of achievement (school, career, sports, etc.). Often involves beliefs that one is stupid, inept, untalented, ignorant, lower in status, less successful than others, etc.

IMPAIRED LIMITS
(Deficiency in internal limits, responsibility to others, or long-term goal-orientation. Leads to difficulty respecting the rights of others, cooperating with others, making commitments, or setting and meeting realistic personal goals. Typical family origin is characterized by permissiveness, overindulgence, lack of direction, or a sense of superiority — rather than appropriate confrontation, discipline, and limits in relation to taking responsibility, cooperating in a reciprocal manner, and setting goals. In some cases, child may not have been pushed to tolerate normal levels of discomfort, or may not have been given adequate supervision, direction, or guidance.)

10. ENTITLEMENT / GRANDIOSITY (ET)
The belief that one is superior to other people; entitled to special rights and privileges; or not bound by the rules of reciprocity that guide normal social interaction. Often involves insistence that one should be able to do or have whatever one wants, regardless of what is realistic, what others consider reasonable, or the cost to others; OR an exaggerated focus on superiority (e.g., being among the most successful, famous, wealthy) — in order to achieve power or control (not primarily for attention or approval). Sometimes includes excessive competitiveness toward, or domination of, others: asserting one’s power, forcing one’s point of view, or controlling the behavior of others in line with one’s own desires — without empathy or concern for others’ needs or feelings.

11. INSUFFICIENT SELF-CONTROL / SELF-DISCIPLINE (IS)
Pervasive difficulty or refusal to exercise sufficient self-control and frustration tolerance to achieve one’s personal goals, or to restrain the excessive expression of one’s emotions and impulses. In its milder form, patient presents with an exaggerated emphasis on discomfort-avoidance: avoiding pain, conflict, confrontation, responsibility, or overexertion — at the expense of personal fulfillment, commitment, or integrity.

OTHER-DIRECTEDNESS
(An excessive focus on the desires, feelings, and responses of others, at the expense of one’s own needs — in order to gain love and approval, maintain one’s sense of connection, or avoid retaliation. Usually involves suppression and lack of awareness regarding one’s own anger and natural inclinations. Typical family origin is based on conditional acceptance: children must suppress important aspects of themselves in order to gain love, attention, and approval. In many such families, the parents’ emotional needs and desires — or social acceptance and status — are valued more than the unique needs and feelings of each child.)

12. SUBJUGATION (SB)
Excessive surrendering of control to others because one feels coerced — usually to avoid anger, retaliation, or abandonment. The two major forms of subjugation are:
A. Subjugation of Needs: Suppression of one’s preferences, decisions, and desires.
B. Subjugation of Emotions: Suppression of emotional expression, especially anger.
Usually involves the perception that one’s own desires, opinions, and feelings are not valid or important to others. Frequently presents as excessive compliance, combined with hypersensitivity to feeling trapped. Generally leads to a build up of anger, manifested in maladaptive symptoms (e.g., passive-aggressive behavior, uncontrolled outbursts of temper, psychosomatic symptoms, withdrawal of affection, “acting out”, substance abuse).

13. SELF-SACRIFICE (SS)
Excessive focus on voluntarily meeting the needs of others in daily situations, at the expense of one’s own gratification. The most common reasons are: to prevent causing pain to others; to avoid guilt from feeling selfish; or to maintain the connection with others perceived as needy. Often results from an acute sensitivity to the pain of others. Sometimes leads to a sense that one’s own needs are not being adequately met and to resentment of those who are taken care of. (Overlaps with concept of codependency.)

14. APPROVAL-SEEKING / RECOGNITION-SEEKING (AS)
Excessive emphasis on gaining approval, recognition, or attention from other people, or fitting in, at the expense of developing a secure and true sense of self. One’s sense of esteem is dependent primarily on the reactions of others rather than on one’s own natural inclinations. Sometimes includes an overemphasis on status, appearance, social acceptance, money, or achievement — as means of gaining approval, admiration, or attention (not primarily for power or control). Frequently results in major life decisions that are inauthentic or unsatisfying; or in hypersensitivity to rejection.

OVERVIGILANCE & INHIBITION
(Excessive emphasis on suppressing one’s spontaneous feelings, impulses, and choices OR on meeting rigid, internalized rules and expectations about performance and ethical behavior — often at the expense of happiness, self-expression, relaxation, close relationships, or health. Typical family origin is grim, demanding, and sometimes punitive: performance, duty, perfectionism, following rules, hiding emotions, and avoiding mistakes predominate over pleasure, joy, and relaxation. There is usually an undercurrent of pessimism and worry — that things could fall apart if one fails to be vigilant and careful at all times.)

15. NEGATIVITY / PESSIMISM (NP)
A pervasive, lifelong focus on the negative aspects of life (pain, death, loss, disappointment, conflict, guilt, resentment, unsolved problems, potential mistakes, betrayal, things that could go wrong, etc.) while minimizing or neglecting the positive or optimistic aspects. Usually includes an exaggerated expectation — in a wide range of work, financial, or interpersonal situations — that things will eventually go seriously wrong, or that aspects of one’s life that seem to be going well will ultimately fall apart. Usually involves an inordinate fear of making mistakes that might lead to: financial collapse, loss, humiliation, or being trapped in a bad situation. Because potential negative outcomes are exaggerated, these patients are frequently characterized by chronic worry, vigilance, complaining, or indecision.

16. EMOTIONAL INHIBITION (EI)
The excessive inhibition of spontaneous action, feeling, or communication — usually to avoid disapproval by others, feelings of shame, or losing control of one’s impulses. The most common areas of inhibition involve: (a) inhibition of anger & aggression; (b) inhibition of positive impulses (e.g., joy, affection, sexual excitement, play); (c) difficulty expressing vulnerability or communicating freely about one’s feelings, needs, etc.; or (d) excessive emphasis on rationality while disregarding emotions.

17. UNRELENTING STANDARDS / HYPERCRITICALNESS (US)
The underlying belief that one must strive to meet very high internalized standards of behavior and performance, usually to avoid criticism. Typically results in feelings of pressure or difficulty slowing down; and in hypercriticalness toward oneself and others. Must involve significant impairment in: pleasure, relaxation, health, self-esteem, sense of accomplishment, or satisfying relationships
Unrelenting standards typically present as: (a) perfectionism, inordinate attention to detail, or an underestimate of how good one’s own performance is relative to the norm; (b) rigid rules and &qout;shoulds&qout; in many areas of life, including unrealistically high moral, ethical, cultural, or religious precepts; or (c) preoccupation with time and efficiency, so that more can be accomplished.

18. PUNITIVENESS (PU)
The belief that people should be harshly punished for making mistakes. Involves the tendency to be angry, intolerant, punitive, and impatient with those people (including oneself) who do not meet one’s expectations or standards. Usually includes difficulty forgiving mistakes in oneself or others, because of a reluctance to consider extenuating circumstances, allow for human imperfection, or empathize with feelings.”

Schema Therapy – Jeffrey Young, Ph.D

As soon as we clicked on I told Linda I needed to speak about Adam. I said it had been on the back-burner for a while now and it’s come to the point where it’s too important to not talk about it. So that’s what we spent the whole session looking at.

I told Linda that I didn’t know where to start and I just spoke about things as they randomly came into my head. I said, ‘I am just so sick of them all. I am so sick of having no space. I need personal space and there is none. Like for example I got some post through the door earlier and the three of them followed me from the door to the kitchen to watch me open it. I asked them to give me space, told them that it was nothing to concern them, the kids went away and Adam’s still there hovering over me waiting for me to open it. It’s not even anything private and I feel like I’m being petty and stupid I mean, nothing happens these days so of course they’re interested if someone gets post but I have had enough of having my every move scrutinised under the magnifying glass its so intense. I just want everyone to go away. Everything he does annoys me.’ Linda asked me if there was anything Adam does that I do like and I was too caught up in the annoyance of it all to find anything. I told her that of course there are things I love about him and that this is just a window in time. I know that I love him very much and that these things weren’t an issue a few weeks ago and they won’t be an issue forever but they’re very much in the foreground at the moment.

I said, ‘the main problem is really just that Adam doesn’t have anything in his life other than me. So all of his eggs are in my basket… he literally relies on me for every single interaction, every conversation… every thought that he wants to share, I’m the only person he can share it with. He has narrowed his life down so much over the years that it’s been reduced to just work and us. It’s not a conscious thing but it’s happened gradually over the years to the point where he now finds himself in a really bizarre situation of having no friends and nothing in his life and I guess he’s comfortable with it this way… and I enable him unintentionally, I make it so easy for him because I want life to be calm and happy, I want him to have a good life and for the kids to be happy, so I run around metaphorically making sure he says and does and understands… it’s fucking exhausting.’

I continued, ‘When I’m not emotionally in the right place like when I was in the thick of the grief 6 weeks ago, I shut down and the space between us has widened because he just doesn’t know how to meet my needs emotionally and when I’m struggling that much I don’t then want to have to teach him how to meet my needs, teach him what to say and how to say it.’ Linda asked me if I resented him for that and I said I did and that I was angry. I explained how I put so much effort into these things and he just goes along as if everything is fine and I have to sweep up behind him.

I said, ‘I think so carefully about everything I do and say. So much effort and hard work goes into the things I deem important, like you pointed out the other day, it really hurts when other people don’t put the same care into things that I do.’ Linda said, ‘yeah I really hear that, I can see there’s a direct link between the way Adam behaves and the way your parents behaved and that’s triggering much bigger feelings… not that it isn’t valid but it also has a deeper meaning for you.’ I nodded and agreed.

I explained that in a way it’s like Adam’s a child emotionally. Not that he doesn’t or can’t understand but that he hasn’t experienced what needs to be experienced for someone to mature in their emotional intelligence. She asked me to continue explaining and I said, ‘well if I think about my life and what has helped me grow and mature and change… it’s having multiple friendships come and go, all the things that go along with friendships, the subtle nuances in adapting and responding to each individual, the tiny disagreements and mending of misunderstandings, the deep conversations, the painful parts, the endings… it all helps you develop a richer and more broad understanding of communication and of yourself… then there’s all the different jobs I’ve had, working in retail where I had to communicate with a vast amount of people, going to university matured me, the depth of intellectual conversations I had at uni with a range of people from lecturers and professors to students… then there’s my job… dealing with difficult conversations with parents or confronting challenges with management or cooperating and working as part of a team or nurturing and being very careful and considerate with the kids I work with… then there’s therapy… the 7 years of work I’ve put in there. Getting to know myself and being deeply attached to the therapist, that all generates growth, the shedding of layers of yourself as you grow out of the skin that once restricted you. But he has had none of that. When I met hm he had a great group of friends and then a horrible situation between one of my toxic friends at the time and his friends kicked off and they made him choose between me or them… I think I told you about this…’ Linda said she remembers. I continued, ‘and then he had a great friend from work who we became really close with, him and his wife, and they had kids when we did and we used to see them all the time but then they moved back to Canada. And his work… he is on his own for the majority of the day not communicating with anyone. So he hasn’t had the rich and diverse situations in his life where he would learn and develop and grow. He’s still in the skin he was in back when I met him… maybe a little but of change and growth but not much. And then there’s the attachment stuff… when we met we were both literally fighting for our lives living with our mums. And we suddenly had each other and very quickly developed an incredibly tight bond based probably on co-dependency and enmeshment. And our anxious attachments suited each other, we both clung so tightly onto each other and we settles each others anxiety because we were both afraid of abandonment. But I don’t have those same needs anymore. I’m far more secure now. I don’t need constant reminders of his love. But he still needs that from me.’

Linda asked, ‘What comes up for you when you talk about that situation with him, when you stack it all up like that, all of what you’ve learned and experienced, all of your growth and what you have next to him and his lack of growth?’ I said, ‘so many things… I guess the main thing I feel is compassion. I’m sad for him. I wish things were different. I am also maybe frustrated because it’s of his own doing, not deliberately but he’s also not doing anything deliberate to change the situation. I work so hard to make improvements and he just wishes it were different and does nothing. I sent him a podcast of Brene Brown this morning, she was talking to this guy, a doctor or psychologist or something about loneliness and connection. They were saying that even if your relationship is perfect it can’t be all you have, you need other connections, other strong attachments, you need a community. He listened to the podcase, he’s always really keen to learn… I do love that about him… he listened and he asked me if I was trying to analyse whether he was lonely and I told him NO… I KNOW he is lonely… I was trying to encourage him to reflect on what’s going on in his life and how totally it is that he feels dissatisfied. I told him it’s a pressure for me to be all he is.’ Linda asked what he said and I told her, ‘he’ll say things like, so do you want me to stop talking to you then?’

I said, ‘he wants physical intimacy, so I’ll walk into the kitchen and he’s there and he’ll lean against the unit and open his arms and tell me to come for a hug and I just don’t want to, I mean I do but I’m stiff and I can feel that I’m not relaxing into the hug. I don’t want him kissing me. I’m annoyed about the emotional intimacy stuff and all the effort and time and energy I have to put into things that it makes me not want to top him up. He constantly asks for reassurance, asks if I still love him, asks if I think he’s fat coz he’s put on like ten pounds in the lockdown, asks if I’m still attracted to him and I do reassure him, I tell him I love him and that I fancy him but there’s a pressure there… I don’t want to have to reassure him every fucking day!’

I said, ‘it’s the emotional load I’m bearing…’ Linda said, ‘emotional labour?’ and I said, ‘yeah! I have to put so much emotional labour into the relationship. Teaching him how to be a parent and how to be a good partner. So much work and effort for me. I mean, I talked to Anna about this and obviously I’m keen for Adam to start therapy and he has shown increasing interest there but she told me to back off… but how can I?’ the analogy that just popped into my mind is imagine you could drive and you decided to teach your partner how to drive… it’s a passing over of knowledge and skills… but I guess growth and therapy is different. I said to Linda, ‘Adam asked me to help him find a therapist but it’s his journey, I need to let him be the soul master of his therapeutic journey, I cant risk taking over and it being about me… I don’t want him getting more into it and resenting me for forcing him down this road. But I have found a couple of therapists… I guess it’s about talking to him about it and seeing if he’s ready to take the step.’ Linda agreed that it’s important for me to step back but also seemed keen on the idea of me giving him a gentle nudge. I said that him starting therapy would probably trigger my insecurities because I’ve spent the past nearly 19 years having his undivided attention.

Linda asked me what would happen if I stopped trying so hard, stopped helping him. I said I felt like I would explode. Life would fall apart and what am I meant to do, just watch it all fall apart? I said, ‘it is threaded through every single fibre of our lives… I’m the one who makes all the effort. If I stop everything stops. Adam comes to me to sort everything. He will walk past the kids to me to tell me that I need to tell the kids to tidy up or get off the ipads or whatever. If they’re playing in the garden and he thinks they’re getting too noisy he’ll come and tell me that the kids need to come in now.’ Linda said, ‘Wow! He gives away his power all the time to you… why do you think he does that?’ I said, ‘to be honest it’s probably my fault. My perfectionism and high expectations of us both mean he is bound to fail. I will always find something he could have done differently, done better… it seriously must be exhausting to be in a relationship with me. Why would he bother doing it himself when I’m just going to tell him he did it wrong!?’

I reflected on what Linda had said to me the other day about me being very prepared, planned, organised, methodical, considered… lesson plans and teachery. I said, ‘It’s not like I was one of these kids that knew all along she wanted to be a teacher and so the side of me that has become more and more teachery is actually a side of me I dislike… it’s organised but is it also controlling? I’ve got high standards but am I also unforgiving? And so… being in an intimate relationship, I mean it’s like he’s an employee or a kid in my class, I’m practically giving him two stars and a wish on his interactions with the kids, ‘oh I noticed you did this and that but have you thought about doing this differently?’and we talk every night reflectively, I will bring things up that happened with the kids and I’ll share stuff I’ve read and tell him how I want to do things differently…’ Linda said it sounds so much like my parents, that Adam is not living consciously just like they weren’t’ living consciously and that is a very important element for me. I said, ‘the only massive difference is that Adam isn’t defensive. He is willing to listen and learn and change whereas my parents were very defensive and never wanted to change… but again the onus is on me to help him learn and change because there is no one else, and I guess up until now I’ve been doing such a good job of that I’ve made it totally unnecessary for him to look for it anywhere else.’

Linda said, ‘I’m listening to you explain things and I get this image of you, it feels like you are running and progressing and you’ve been doing that all your life, like all your life nothing has been wasted, not a single minute, you’ve worked bloody hard to make sure every experience you’ve had has been for something, you’ve used it to grow and improve and change and adapt… and you’ve been picking up speed especially over the past few years you have been running fast in your therapy journey and I just have this image of him and he’s stayed in the same place.’ I said, ‘yeah… and I feel like this is not what I signed up for, but then he could easily feel that too, he has stayed the same I’m the one who has changed and maybe he liked things the way they were but then I feel like I have improved my life is so much better than it used to be and I want him to come with me, I love him, I feel like we were holding hands and now its harder to stretch back and keep holding on but I’m determined to not leave him behind I want him to come with me.’

Linda said, ‘I just want to say that no one is coming out of this lockdown the same as they were when they went in. especially intimate relationships. They have all been under pressure and those of us who are reflective and deep thinkers will have been doing a lot of learning and growing through the past few months. There is a lot of learning that will need to take place in relationships to get us all back on track… for everyone.’ I said, ‘I’m good at learning but then I’m gonna have to teach him!’ Linda said, ‘Yes and that’s not what you signed up for when you went into the relationship. You’re not his therapist or life coach, you wanted to be his life partner, it needs to be equal.’ I said, ‘I think it’s actually really important to see how much I have changed. The enmeshed, codependent, ‘two halves of one whole’ thing we had when we were teenagers isn’t what I want any more. I want autonomy and choice and freedom and a love that feels safe enough and strong enough to move away and come back freely… he needs constant attention and affection and stimulation whereas I feel confident in our love without having to see him and be near him all the time.’

Linda said, ‘I want to just mention something and if it doesn’t fit where you’re at just bat it away okay?’ I nodded and listened. She said, ‘do you have much going on in your life at the moment other than him?’ I said, ‘well no… but not through any decision of mine, the lockdown has reduced my busy and full life down to these four walls and these three people.’ She said, ‘and have you been connecting with friends and other people as much as you would normally?’ I said, ‘well no actually. There are some people who have been on the same wavelength as me through the grief and intensity of all of this but some people haven’t and so a distance has grown between me and them. And then I haven’t seen colleagues, I haven’t gone to the gym… I haven’t had my usual social events… everything has gone.’ Linda said, ‘So the lockdown has made you have the same life as him. I wonder if that’s magnifying things for you. I wonder if you are feeling the isolation and pain and loneliness for the both of you. And because you didn’t choose this life, it feels intolerable…’ I sat thinking for a while and she asked if that made sense. I said it did and she said, ‘is it landing? Will it go in?’ I said, ‘this is a lot, I’m letting it settle… I think on the one hand it is that I am carrying the weight of the isolation and loneliness for both of us and on the other hand also my newly formed ‘narrowed down’ life is meaning there are no longer the same distractions for me, I am having to face what has been here all along but was easier to bear because I had balance. With no balance it is harder to be okay with this.’  

I said, ‘the thing is, when we were teenagers neither of us knew anything about co-dependency or boundaries or whatever…’ Linda said, ‘yeah 19 years is a long time and of course things have changed,’ I said, ‘but I’m not sure he has changed, not the core of him, he still kind of lives with the premise that we complete each other or whatever… there is no boundary between us for him but I don’t feel like that anymore.’ I then gave Linda two examples. One was a time when Adam was looking for something and he started to open my bedside table to search for the item. I can’t even remember what he was looking for but I know it wasn’t in the drawer. I didn’t want him rummaging through my drawer. There isn’t even anything particularly private in there and there’s nothing he doesn’t know about but I just hate the feeling of him going through my stuff. Despite me explicitly saying ‘NO, I don’t want you going through my stuff’ he proceeded, in a light-hearted ‘what’s the problem’ type way, to tip the contents of the drawer on the bed, sweep through it, see the thing wasn’t there, stuff it all back in and push the drawer back in… while I swallowed my rage. Another example was when I gave him my phone to show him photos from the day we had at the beach. When it got to the last photo I said, ‘that’s the last one’ and reached my hand out but he continued to swipe and saw the picture I’d made from the photo of the heart shaped stone on the beach that I’d edited for the post about missing Anna. I didn’t want him to see that picture. My page is anonymous even to him, he doesn’t know the name of the blog and I don’t want him to see the content. I was so angry with him for continuing to swipe despite me saying that was the last photo. He just chuckled and passed the phone back to me (after looking at the picture) and I sat not speaking to him for the rest of the evening with my headphones in. later I said to him,  ‘I don’t share the intimate personal things about my emotional life with you because you don’t respect them, you don’t treat it with care and delicacy, you are not careful with hwo you speak to me and it hurts so I build a wall between us to protect myself. If you want me to share more with you then you need to be more emotionally open and caring with me.’ He apologised and asked what he could do that is more helpful. I said to Linda, ‘its not that he is deliberately hurting me its just that he really doesn’t get it.’ She said, ‘yeah it’s like he doesn’t see, doesn’t notice…’ I said, ‘yeah but it just feels so violating.’ She said ‘violating’ at the same time as me.

I said, ‘I actually cant stand it. I would never do that! I would never just rummage through someone’s stuff. I wouldn’t do it to Adam or my kids, it’s really not okay!’ I felt a lot of the teen hurt and anger rising and I could sense Linda looking closely at me though I wasn’t looking at her. I repeated, ‘I just don’t like it when people do something when you ask them not to.’ Linda said, ‘and that’s something your mum would do.’ I said, ‘yeah and I said that to Adam at a later date. I told him that respecting my privacy is really important. I had no privacy growing up. She would go through my room, she’d look under my bed, I remember coming home from school and she would have gutted my room and she would keep things of mine, she’d take my magazines and whatever she wanted. She’d read my diary… there was no privacy, I didn’t even know that you were allowed to feel safe and protected from the invasion of other people you know?’ Linda was shaking her head and sighing as I explained what my mum was like. She talked about how the violation feels so similar and that’s why it is having such a strong impact on me.

She said, ‘I can hear from what you’re saying and from your big sighs that you are very frustrated and angry about this. His behaviour is reminding you of your parents and that is really important to notice. He’s not understanding or seeing your boundaries.’ I explained that if I try to assert boundaries, he interprets it as me not loving him.’ I checked my phone just off screen and Linda said, ‘did you just check the time?’ I laughed and said ,’yes you didn’t give me a ten minute warning!’ she said, ‘sorry you’re right I didn’t, 5 minutes to go!’ I said it was fine and she asked how I felt. I told her it felt like we had just scratched the surface. Linda assured me that if it still felt important on Saturday we could revisit it.

There’s a lot going on for me as I process all of this. I am not at all comfortable with Adam’s behaviour reminding me of my mum. I don’t like noticing the feelings of having my boundaries violated. I also am confused about my feelings on the actual way Linda works. She does a lot of listening and repeating. I really feel like she does listen very closely and she helps make connections but when I did this kind of work with Anna she would blow my mind with her insights, no exaggeration it was like she had these golden nuggets that would propel my relational growth… Linda just doesn’t offer this kind of depth. But does her more laid back approach allow me to formulate my own understanding of things? It’s a bit like talking to a friend… though some friends offer me huge insights, way more than Linda. It is reminiscent of this idea that I am always the one who has to work very hard… even within the therapy with Linda, she is taking a back seat and I am doing the lion’s share of the work. With Anna I felt like she worked so hard to help me. But then I wonder if Linda will be able to play a bigger role in these conversations as our work deepens and she gets to know me better. Who knows. But I am emotionally exhausted. I feel a lot of tearful energy in my chest and down my arms. It’s been an intense session and a long day processing it all.

I immediately told Linda that I feel nervous about the email. That I read it over directly before the session and feel like it really could have waited until now. Linda said that it seems to be a really important part of my process, to get my thoughts down on the page. She said it makes sense but what interests her is that I actually send it. I don’t write and then keep it. I talked about all the ways that has played out through my time in therapy. I explained that with Paul I would email him after every session and he said he didn’t mind me doing that, he called it a cathartic process. He never brought up anything I wrote and probably expected me to bring it up but I interpreted his lack of initiating as reluctance to talk about whatever I had mentioned in the email. With Anna she made it really clear very early on that she didn’t want me sending big long emails. She didn’t want me emailing session content that should be focused on in the session which made a lot of sense to me but I found it really hard. I explained to Linda, ‘so in the beginning I would type it up and pass it over to her in session and she would read it then we’d talk about it. After a while of doing that, one day she suggested that I read the letter out loud to her in the session. And then after a while of doing that one day she stopped me from unfolding the bit of paper. I remember so clearly Anna saying, ‘I bet you’ve read that piece of paper over many times and you know it off by heart, how about you put it down on the table and just tell me…’ from then on I didn’t need to type up these notes in preparation for the sessions.’ I reflected to Linda that the few times I have sent her an email it’s been about stuff to do with our relationship and how we interact with and understand each other. I said, ‘actually it’s almost as if I was trying to reassure you, the last email…’ Linda said, ‘yes I got that,’

I said, ‘so how did you feel…? Did anything come up for you when reading the email?’ Linda laughed and said it was a long email. I asked specifically if it was hard to be my ‘after Anna’ therapist. She thought for a bit and said, ‘well you were absolutely spot on with one thing, you very accurately pointed out that it is a very unusual experience, what’s happened to you, what’s brought you to me. I have taken this to supervision you know because it is a brand new experience for me and thankfully doesn’t happen all the time and I don’t mean anything insulting in saying that. It’s very uncommon, usually death or very ill health and sadly it has happened to you.’ I nodded and she asked what came up for me when she said that. I said, ‘well the egotistical part of me is thinking, ‘at least you probably wont forget me in a hurry, it makes me unique!’ but yeah… I guess overall I just really like your transparency, it feels nice that you are honest… also though… there is this sense that you are burdened by me, you didn’t choose to work with me… it’s this thing that has come up for me with you, Anna and Paul actually. So, I just think it’s so weird that clients get to shop around for their therapist but therapists don’t get to choose who they work with, you just get lumbered with whoever walks through your door. You know, it must be so shit when you start to realise that you really hate this person sitting in front of you and this long road stretches out in front of you…’ Linda had a calm, gentle smile on her face and she was slowly shaking her head. She said, ‘Lucy, we do choose! Of course we do! I’ve had the situation a number of times when I have stopped work with someone. Maybe there’s a conflict of interest or I know something about the person that could contaminate the work or in couples therapy maybe I feel that one or both of them need individual therapy so I send them away for that…’ I said, ‘yeah so I just keep imagining that I’m going to come to a session and you’re going to say to me this is not worth your time and effort and you’re going to finish with me.’ Linda said, ‘oh sorry, no, what I mean is, that’s in the first session… you make a mutual decision in the first session to work together or not.’ I said, ‘yeah so our first session was under the premise of being temporary until Anna came back to me…’ Linda said, ‘yes and then we had another first session, beginning our work together after Anna closed her practice. I already knew you and was happy to work with you again.’ I smiled and told her how good it is to hear that. I told her again that I really liked it when she said that she wanted to get to know me.

I talked a bit more about feeling like people must be burdened by my needs, my emotions. I wondered aloud about my mum’s inability to see or tolerate me. I said I felt grateful that Linda was tolerating me and she said she absolutely hates the word tolerate so much she wants to scrunch it up and throw it out the window. This took me on a tangent recalling an exam I failed at Uni (failed because of my controversial opinions at the time and reluctance to comply) where we had to discuss the place of religious education in non-denominational schools. My stance was that there was no place for it if it stayed as it was. The Scottish education system has changed since then but at the time R.E. was not equally and fairly/non-judgmentally taught in my opinion. More time was dedicated to Christianity than the 5 other religions we taught. I talked about one of the terms used in the curriculum which was to ‘encourage tolerance’. I told Linda that I hated this word because it seemed to me to be the bare minimum you could do for another human being… it insinuated a deep level of mistrust and distain that you were ‘good enough’ to disguise with tolerance. She completely agreed and then went on to say how it would be impossible to foster a therapeutic relationship if all she could manage was tolerance for me. She said, ‘The tree most important, core elements of Person Centred therapy are congruence, empathy and unconditional positive regard (UPR)… there are 7 elements but these are the 3 most important ones and without them, the therapy wouldn’t work. So there isn’t tolerance… there’s unconditional positive regard… that’s such an important distinction.’

I said, ‘I actually really can feel that from you… the unconditional positive regard, it really is actually such a powerful feeling when you let it in. When I worked with Paul I constantly worried about being too much for him. He taught me about unconditional positive regard but I constantly questioned it. Then with Anna it wasn’t until the last couple of sessions where it finally clicked and I could clearly see that she wasn’t just tolerating me, I wasn’t a burden to her, she actually liked working with me… I felt her love, but it was too late by then. I wasted all that time with her worrying thinking she dreaded every session…’ Linda made a really sympathetic noise and said how sad it was that I felt like that. I said, ‘so I do feel actually that you are uhhh…’ Linda said, ‘…not bull shitting you!? I laughed and said, ‘yes! Exactly!’ I went into a bit of a monologue about my mum and how everything had to be focused on her. Linda made a comment that my mum was very consistent in the fact that everything had to be focused on her. I recalled the scene in Mary Poppins that I’ve talked about in therapy before (but frustratingly I can’t remember which therapist I spoke to about it!). I told her that I used to watch the film over and over and how it comforted me. I said, ‘there’s a scene where Mary Poppins is talking to Jane and Michael, preparing them for the next day when they’re going to visit their dads work in the city and she’s talking about the lady who feeds the birds. Jane says that her father goes past that place every day and must have seen the lady and Mary Poppins says that many grown ups can’t see past their own nose… and I remember thinking when I was a child, that was my parents! They couldn’t see me, I could be in complete emotional turmoil and they wouldn’t notice…’ Linda said, ‘wow… you even noticed that as a kid!’ I explained that I found my place by doing what was needed of me and if I can’t find a way to be needed then the relationship feels very insecure. ‘So, with us… I can’t please you and be of use to you by meeting your emotional needs, so what do I do..? I be a good client, I pay on time, I don’t go a second over time, I don’t arrive or log in a second before my time, I don’t ask for too much, I keep checking that I’m not being too much, I make sure you don’t feel burdened by me…’ Linda was smiling and nodding and we talked about it her commitment to our work. I told her that I felt it, I felt that she was committed and she said, ‘and am I right in thinking that although you’ve said you do trust that I’m not burdened by you, and that I am committed to working with you, it’s something that we will need to revisit… many time’s, as many times as you need…?’ I said, ‘well yeah coz it’s like a room full of people, so one person believes you! But everyone needs to be on board!’ She nodded and smiled and said that made perfect sense.

I said, ‘I think one of the really important things I wanted to get across to you in the email actually was that I really appreciate you and that I want you to know I am grateful for these sessions…’ Linda said, ‘I really do get that message from you Lucy, loud and clear, from the way you behave and speak and everything you’re doing and saying, it is absolutely categorically, unquestionably clear to me that you value these sessions and that you’re grateful I’m here with you. Not a doubt in my mind. I want to make that very clear to you that I really get that very strong message from you. I know you appreciate this.’ I was smiling broadly and told her it was so good to hear her saying all that. It’s really important to me. I said, ‘I think one of the worst things, most painful things ever is to not feel seen or appreciated. It’s so important to me that you do know that I see you, Linda and that I see you trying to connect to me.’

I said, ‘I went back to Anna’s office yesterday, as seems to be my crazy masochistic habit on a Tuesday… actually no it’s not crazy that was unkind.’ Just as I was saying that Linda simultaneously said, ‘that’s an unkind thing to say about yourself…’ we smiled and I continued, ‘it seems to help my grieving, being closer to the office and being by myself and away from the watchful eyes of my kids… but yesterday the grief and heaviness wasn’t there. It felt different and it wasn’t numb either. It felt like all of this grieving and how I’ve been honouring the loss and pain and really leaning into it, I’ve been loyal to the process and cried when I need to and followed the road to Anna’s when I felt the pull and anyway yesterday it really felt like a settled and trusting feeling in my chest as if I’m starting to feel safe in here… just something I noticed.’ Linda talked a bit about that but didn’t really add to what I’d said.

I checked the time on my phone and then we both laughed about that because I’d changed the view on the zoom window but was still clock watching. I told her that Anna used to turn the clock away because of my habit of stressing about time, ‘it’s hard for me to really get a sense of passing time in my body, for all I know 5 minutes could have passed or 35 minutes and I don’t want to launch into something hard when I only have two minutes left!’ Linda said, ‘yeah I really get it, you’re keeping yourself safe.’ I said, ‘that reminds me actually because Anna used to tell me to let her hold the time in the session and she would give me like a ten minute warning at the end of the session so I’d know not to go too deeply into anything or at least I would have a choice and that was really helpful.’ We agreed that Linda would do that too, 5 or 10 minute warning towards the end of the session.

Linda then said, ‘So that reminds me actually and I just wanted to check with you… when you ask me a direct question that I need to go and think about, how do you want me to deal with that? Do you want me to wait until you bring it up again or do you want me to give you the answer as soon as I’ve got one?’ I said, ‘Yes… I want you to just bring it up whenever you have the answer, I won’t badger you for an answer when you might not have had time to think about it. I want you to bring it up when you have something to say about whatever it is.’ Linda said, ‘okay… so you asked me three questions and I’ve got answers to two of them.’ I started to get really unnecessarily nervous. There’s something really scary about hearing ‘no’ or even expecting it. Which is weird because I don’t feel entitled to ‘yes’ but it’s a sense of rejection or something. Anyway, she continued, ‘I have reflected on the hour and a half session. I thought carefully about it and talked it through in supervision and this is my stuff Lucy, I’m owning this… but my overall feeling is I just don’t think I could do that. Not just with you but with anyone, my initial thought on 90 minute sessions is ‘ahh I couldn’t do that!’ I would be exhausted, I’d need an espresso or something to get me through and I want to be at my best for you. I just don’t think I could sit that long with anyone. But could you maybe go away and think about how you would feel about something slightly different… I know it seems a bit pedantic but what about an hour or an hour and ten minutes? I don’t know if something like that would be doable for you? Would it be helpful?’ I said, ‘Oh yeah absolutely! I think when I reflected on the fact that Anna would sometimes do 90 minute sessions with me I was just talking about how 50 minutes just isn’t long enough for the very deep things. Anna would say she didn’t want to send a child driving home, you know… it’s just an analogy but I guess coz it was all new to me, going to those places inside me and I can’t contain it by myself so it needs to be really slow and sort of drip fed and then only a small amount and come back out of it and help me ground in the present moment so it feels safe to go out to the real world again, you know? So I’d actually thought about how even 60 minutes or 70 minutes would be better than 50 minutes and it wouldn’t be every session just every so often… and I actually can’t see it happening in the video sessions and I get that it might be different with you than it was with Anna but I just feel that 50 minutes is very short… maybe when we’re finally allowed to meet in person and we can see how things feel between us we might want to plan you know like the last Saturday in the month is gonna be a long one or whatever.’ We talked this over and Linda was happy to be flexible and plan slightly longer sessions in which felt amazing so it wasn’t a straight ‘no’, she was willing to meet me half way. She brought up the ‘last Sat of every month’ thing and I laughed and said that obviously it wasn’t possible to plan these things in advance and that maybe we could contract it together if we sense something coming up and we could plan the time in and she would charge me and it would all be arranged in advance. I was the one saying all this, I think she is not as uptight as me!

She then went on to answer my second question which was about the possibility of me spending time in Anna’s room. She explained that she did ask and it was a flat no. she said they’d made it clear that me renting the room or being allowed access to the room by myself was just not possible. I asked if it was an insurance thing and she said yes sort of. She explained that there’s some political stuff going on with the actual company that owns the buildings and rents the rooms out. She explained that they want people to start using the rooms from today. I said, ‘wow!’ she said ‘I know!’ We talked about how irresponsible and out with the realms of the government guidelines it is and I agreed with her hesitation about meeting in the rooms so early on in phase two of the lockdown. I said it was irresponsible and she agreed. I said, ‘so I can’t sit in a room with my dad but I can sit with my therapist? That’s a bit nuts!’ she said she was uncomfortable with how they’re doing things and they’re being quite heavy handed. They are now charging the therapists full price for the rental of the rooms and not deep cleaning between clients which they should be doing. She isn’t comfortable sitting with a client until September at the earliest which I completely understand and agree with. In my opinion nothing is worth the risk of spreading the virus unnecessarily. I told Linda that I had feared she would say to me she’d decided to never meet clients face to face again and she assured me that wasn’t going to happen but that she’d rather err on the side of caution which I completely agree with. Linda then explained that from January they’re going to be putting a minimum rental on the rooms which means she will need to use the room longer than she wants to or be charged regardless of whether she’s using it or not. She said from January she won’t be there anymore. I said, ‘this might be too personal but why not just have all the sessions at your flat? I know you use the room in your flat for some of the week… why rent a room at all?’ Linda said, ‘well exactly, that’s one of my options, I’m exploring it in supervision. I just felt it would be good to let you in on this as it’s a big change. I am looking at another building as well.’

Linda said, ‘How do you feel about all of this?’ I took a few minutes and then said, ‘I actually feel okay about it. I thought I’d feel really panicky at the thought of never going back there but especially after sitting yesterday looking at the closed door and feeling more peaceful, I think maybe it will help me be able to let it go. Like moving on with a new chapter. I think it was going to be very painful to be in that building and walk past her door. But I feel in a way like it’s easier to move on from the grief if I’m not constantly reminded of the building and the space we occupied within it. Everything you’ve said I agree with. It makes me so sad to see and hear how some companies and governments are putting money first beyond the safety of the people. Opening up places before it’s safe. I saw that in England they’re threatening to fine parents who decide to not send their kids to school when they reopen and I’ve seen it being discussed that it might be that if people refuse the vaccine they won’t be allowed to have full time education… I mean, that’s like living in some sort of dictatorship! I don’t know if I would want us to use a vaccine that’s only been on the market a few months, with absolutely no long term testing. It could make the kids infertile or something… and I’m not anti-vax but I am anti-knee jerk… I would need to do some research… but anyway…. don’t know why I brought that up… I just agree with what you’ve said and think it’s a good idea to be cautious.’ Linda said she would be able to tell me on Saturday whether she will be using the old office or not.

I said, ‘there’s something so nice about being involved in your thoughts on this. It feels like it did when Anna moved from the old office to the new one. She brought me with her. Like, when Paul moved his practice he didn’t take me with him and you know when dad left he didn’t take me with him… and they even used to go on holidays without me… but anyway, so when Anna said she was moving to this new office she was so excited about the new room and she printed a map off for me and hand wrote directions and it just felt so nice that we were going together… and this feels like that. You’re telling me about this change but you’re taking me with you. I like that feeling.’

Linda didn’t mention the third question which I realised as soon as I logged off was to do with touch and hugs in therapy. I’m quite happy for her to take her time and think as much as possible about that one and maybe work with me for a few months and meet me in person before she commits to an answer. I get the impression she won’t have a solid answer for it right now anyway.

At one point when I was talking about my childhood I talked about how the days dragged and were so boring and depressing, punctuated by explosive, raging arguments and emotional upset. Mum was obsessed with home improvements so we would spend many weekends running crazy in B&Q while my mum chose wallpaper and paint for yet another new look in the livingroom. My bedroom never got redecorated but I would hazard a guess that she redecorated her room and the livingroom and kitchen over ten times a year. It was insane. The woman who had no money for her kids to have a new school uniform or shoes yet bought Laura Ashley wallpaper and fucking Farrow and Ball paint! I said, ‘she never asked us what we wanted to do, we never EVER did stuff we wanted to do. We never got a choice over what we ate, where we went… no choice ever. Whereas I always check to see what the kids and Adam want to do. I was thinking about how you made the analogy in the last session about me and lesson plans and yeah, I do like being organised and in control and sorted you know, I like things feeling sorted. I don’t like just leaving stuff to chance, so when we plan a holiday I plan activities and day trips and cafes and all sorts. And even at the weekends I’ll ask the kids what they want to do, I ask them what they’d like me to add to the food shop… you know they are part of the family and they are separate wee individuals I want them to live their lives fully… I couldn’t I wasn’t allowed to do that.’ Linda said, ‘oh wow it’s just hit me… you put so much effort into everything! You work hard at everything! Wow. Yeah its just become so clear to me, you put so much work into everything!’ I said, ‘yeah… yep I do. Parenting is like a full time job…’ Linda interrupted and said, ‘and this, you treat your therapy like a full time job and then there’s your actual job!’ She then went on to ponder the idea of easing off the pressure I put myself under. I said, ‘but I don’t think it’s a conscious decision, this need to work very hard and put in the maximum effort… it’s that I don’t want to fuck up. I don’t want to be like her. My mum never tried. I don’t think she ever considered my feelings on anything, for a second.’ Linda said, ‘I know. I know.’ In a very kind way. I said, ‘I don’t really know how it would look like for me to step off the treadmill and relax.’

I said, ‘I’m feeling a deeper connection with you today. Well, I mean I felt it in the last session too, I said it in the email.’ Linda said, ‘yeah, you did.’ I continued, ‘I actually felt a connection from the first couple of sessions. I felt that there was a lack of a defensive wall on my part, like I was ready to just launch right in and I felt like we got each other!’ Linda was just smiling, I continued, ‘and I feel like there’s been a deeper connection or a younger connection brewing the past couple of sessions and it feels nice… nice and scary!’ Linda said, ‘good!’ while I was saying nice and then, ‘hmmm I understand.’ When I said scary.

Just before we finished Linda said something that she had said in the previous session which feels like it’s very important to her. She said, ‘Oh, another thing you mentioned in your email was the type of work you did with Anna. You talked quite a lot about the work you did with Anna and it could be that we do very different work together. That over here is the work you did with Anna and then over here is the work you do with me.’ I said I heard her and she said, ‘yes you hear me but have you just deflected it?’ I said, ‘no it’s definitely interesting. I have noticed that I could talk about the same thing with all three of you and end up coming at it from three very different angles and get three different things out of it. So yeah, I get what you’re saying!’ Linda said that was interesting and reminded me that anything that comes up for me I can write it down and then it’s up to me if I send it to her or wait until the next session to bring it up.

I felt like we did a lot of ironing out of practicalities today. Talking about the length of sessions and location. But actually all of that is important in itself and led on to important conversations. It’s the weird type of session where you wonder if you actually got your money’s worth out of the therapy. But it’s like a grain of sand in the brick that will eventually make the relationship a bit more secure that will then be built into the wall of the main body of the healing work. And that is important. Its small, vital steps. Linda talks about trusting the process a lot. She talked about it today actually, that we can’t always know why something comes up in a session or where we’re going with it but it is all important. Maybe part of my healing journey will be learning to trust the process, let go of this constricting pressure to always do my best and out perform myself. Linda seems really laid back and relaxed, maybe she’s the right person to teach me how to chill out a bit!?

So, it’s Tuesday again. And even when I’m not really sure of the days (due to some sort of lockdown haze), Monday evening always feels very heavy and emotionally charged. Then I remember it’s the eve of losing Anna and it makes sense. My body remembers and brings the panic and hopeless despair to the foreground.

I drove to Anna’s old office today. I’ve done it almost every Tuesday since the day she called me. I experience a physical pull to be closer to the place she held me. I’ve noticed that on the days I find myself deep in these young feelings I end up drawn to specific locations. Anna’s office. My childhood house (one of them). My old school. A park we sometimes went to. There’s something validating about returning to the place where it happened or where it was felt. Seeing the building or the land. It’s like I’m saying to a small part of me, ‘it was real, it happened, I was there, it exists and your feelings are real.’ Simultaneously I am saying, ‘you’re safe now, I’ve got you.’ It’s as if I find myself searching for an anchor for the pain. Usually when I’m struggling to make sense of the feelings or fully express them. In the absence of an internal sense of grounding it’s as if I go back ‘to the scene of the crime’ so to speak – I look for the pain and the memories and the validation in all the places it may have been lost.

Today, strangely, I couldn’t feel it. I sat staring at that locked door and couldn’t feel a connection to the grief. It can’t be summoned, just like if it’s there it can’t be squashed. What I did feel was an overall sense of calm and safety. Like a tiny glimmer of something new, something solid… like trust. Maybe slowly, through these actions and through my patient commitment to feeling and processing this grief, the younger parts of me are learning to trust they are safe with me… and maybe one day that means the anchor that I am searching for will be grounded inside me.

20.06.20

Anna,

I was sitting in the garden this morning and Reuben dragged the other chair right up beside me, he couldn’t get any closer. He sat up and said, ‘mummy, when I’m a big man taller than daddy will I still be your baby?’ I said, ’yes darling, you’ll always be my baby.’ He said he didn’t want to ever move out and live with a different family and I said he could stay with me as long as he wants and he’ll always be in my heart. It reminded me of when I’d drag the heavy chair up right beside you, Anna. And I’d ask you if you’ll ever leave. And you said unless ill health or death stops you being able to work with me you’re not going anywhere. And you told me you are always inside me and I am in you. That you’ll never forget me. Four misses you so much today. She’d give anything to drag the chair right up to you and sit close today.

Love as always xx

27.06.20

Anna,

It is so hard to not text you.

I miss you so much. With every fibre of my being. I wish we could just go back to the way things were before. It was working so well. I miss your hugs and your gentle patience. I miss being seen by you. The grief is as present today as it was five weeks ago.

I just can’t believe you’re really gone and I’m really not going to see you again.

It’s breaking my heart all over again, when I didn’t think the pieces could be broken any further.

It hurts like hell.

I love you,

Lucy xx

29.06.20

Anna,

Six weeks ago right now I had a terrifying sense that I was never going to see you again. In the morning I would receive your call telling me exactly that. I can remember your words so clearly.

I hope you know that my silence over the past 6 weeks represents my love for you, my respect for your boundaries and my desire to not make your life any harder than it already is. That I have not and can not forget you. I hope you know that I have wanted to text you every single day.

You are the biggest presence in my mind and heart. You’re everywhere.

The grief I feel for you has ripped my heart right open. There are no walls or hardened scars anymore, just an open wound letting all the love pour in and out.

Anna, you opened my heart to it all.

I love you,

Lucy xxx